Awake Security today raised $36 million in Series C financing bringing its total raised to nearly $80 million. The 3-year-old startup says it will use the capital to meet the growing demand for the network detection and response platform.

“Mostly expansion,” said CEO Rahul Kashyap, when asked how Awake would use the latest investment. “We’ve primarily focused on the U.S., so doubling down on that, but also focusing more on the channel as well and the European market.”

Partnering with investors Evolution Equity Partners and Liberty Global Ventures, both of which have European network and security expertise, should also help Awake achieve this goal. And those ties played a key role in both investors’ participation in the Series C, Kashyap said. Evolution Equity Partners led the $36 million funding round with participation from Energize Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures, as well as existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Greylock Partners.

“Initially we were looking for a smaller amount of money, but there is a lot of interest in the company,” Kashyap said. “Everyone we got as investors are very well attuned to the market.”

Awake’s venture round, announced in July 2017 at the startup’s launch, pulled in $30 million. Kashyap won’t comment on his company’s valuation other than to say “it’s a fairly significant up round.” Just under 70 customers use the vendor’s artificial intelligence-based platform.

The company claims it increased its annual recurring revenue by close to 700% and doubled its employee headcount over the past year. “We expect to keep our triple-digit growth this year despite [the coronavirus pandemic],” Kashyap said. It also continues to displace more established vendors in the market, he added. This includes “several Darktrace customers, several large RSA networking customers, some Cisco Stealthwatch.”

Earlier this year Awake partnered with Google Cloud, which extended its network traffic analysis across all three major cloud providers. It now provides full packet forensics and supports audits, investigations, and compliance with regulations like PCI-DSS across customers’ hybrid-cloud environments.

The latest funding round will also help Awake expand its cloud security capabilities, Kashyap said. “A very big, strategic piece of the platform is to enable and secure cloud infrastructure, so we expect to invest in that,” he said. “We have existing partnership with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft we plan to expand on that, and get some large enterprise customers for that offering as well.”