Dive Brief:

• Cylance announced it successfully raised $100 million in Series D funding.

• The latest round places Cylance in the 'unicorn' club of young companies with $1 billion valuations.

• The company’s CylancePROTECT product uses artificial intelligence to predict how cybercriminals can attack networks.

Dive Insight:

Many cybersecurity firms have seen their valuations plummet over the last six months. Analysts say high-profile data breaches drove security spending up in 2015, making cybersecurity company valuations too high. But the fact that Cylance’s solution is AI-based seems to be attracting more interest, as some think that using AI may be the future of cybersecurity. 

"We founded Cylance almost four years ago with a singular mission: protect those who cannot protect themselves, and empower those who can," said Cylance founder Stuart McClure in a statement. "Our goal of reinventing endpoint security by using machine learning to think like a cyber hacker has been achieved and we now must ensure that it is put in the hands of security leaders inside enterprises, organizations, governments and small businesses as quickly as possible."

Cylance is already one of the fastest-growing security startups to date, working with over 1,000 companies and government agencies. Cylance primarily works with large businesses and agencies now, but McClure said they will soon launch tools for SMBs.