Palerra is among a number of cloud security startups combining predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms in clever ways

Cloud security vendor Palerra has secured $17m in series B funding, a move the company said would help accelerate sales and marketing efforts around its predictive analytics and threat detection services.

Palerra’s flagship service, Loric, combines threat detection and predictive analytics in order to provide automatic incident response and remediation for malicious traffic flowing to a range of cloud services and platforms.

Over the past few years we’ve seen a flurry of cloud security startups emerge, which all deploy analytics and machine learning algorithms to cleverly detect perceived and actual threats and respond in real-time, so it would seem enterprises are starting to become spoilt with choice.

The $17m round was led by August Capital, with participation from current investors Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital, and brings the total amount secured by the firm to $25m.

The funds will be used to bolster sales and marketing efforts at the firm.

“The dramatic rise in adoption of cloud services by today’s enterprises against the backdrop of our generation’s most potent cyber threats has necessitated a new approach. LORIC was designed to meet these threats head on and this new round underscores our commitment to deliver the most powerful cloud security solution in the industry,” said Rohit Gupta, founder and chief executive officer of Palerra.

“As the perimeter disintegrates into a set of federated cloud-based and on-premises infrastructures, effective monitoring becomes almost impossible, unless security controls are embedded in these heterogeneous environments. This will require enterprises to reconsider and possibly redesign their security architecture and corresponding security controls by placing those controls in the cloud,” Gupta added.