Illumio today announced it has raised a $100 million investment round from big-name investors to pursue its security solutions for virtualized environments.

The company will use the money to scale the development and sales of its Adaptive Security Platform (ASP), which targets application-level security in the cloud. Illumio's software is designed to monitor the security of traffic flows inside of specific application workflows, and follow them if they are moved in the cloud.

The investors include a who's who list of top Silicon Valley venture capital firms and individuals. Participating in the round are new investors BlackRock Funds and Accel Partners, joined by existing venture investors Formation 8, Andreessen Horowitz, and General Catalyst. Also participating are Microsoft Chairman John W. Thompson, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

The company, which was only founded in 2013, already has big-name customers including Morgan Stanley, Plantronics, NTT, and Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

Illumio is moving faster than most startups with its significant customer base and huge round of funding. That may because concerns about cloud security are escalating, and the growth of virtualization and Software Defined Networking (SDN) is placing new demands on security software.

Alan Cohen, Illumio's Chief Commerical Officer, told The Rayno Report in February that the company already had more than 30 customers, including the big names discussed above.

Cohen said that an entirely new security approach is needed for networks as they become more virtualized.

"All of this software is faster and easier to build, but it's more complicated and it's distributed. We're building the first distributed software for security."

The deal makes Illumio one of the hottest security startups in the cloud networking space. That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as cloud-based networks are under assault like never before. As The Rayno Report detailed in a recent webinar and report, more than 400 million records have been compromised in the last two years -- and a security survey recently showed that 76% of companies polled take hours or longer to detect a breach.

Illumio was founded by CEO Andrew Rubin, CTO PJ Kirner, and Chief Commercial Officer Alan Cohen. Rubin and Kirner previously worked at Cymtec Systems while Cohen is a veteran of Cisco, Airespace (acquired by Cisco), and Nicira (acquired by VMware). The new funding brings the company's total to $142 million in just two years.