Exabeam closed a $75 million Series E funding round, bringing its total haul to $190 million in its quest to edge out other security information and event management (SIEM) vendors such as IBM, McAfee, RSA, and Splunk.

“We invest a lot more in innovation versus those companies,” said Exabeam CEO Nir Polak.

New investor Sapphire Ventures and existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with other existing investors participating. In addition to developing new product features and configurations, Exbeam will use the Series E to expand its sales reach. “And also we’re looking to do things as we grow that are not just organic moves,” Polak said. This includes mergers and acquisitions.

“We’re kicking ass in the market continuing to displace the legacy vendors,” he added, naming the aforementioned companies as well as LogRhythm and Micro Focus. “When we go head to head with them in replacement deals, we win 72% of the time.”

Additionally, during the last fiscal year, 76% of Exabeam’s replacement deals eliminated these and other legacy vendors, Polak said. And the company’s average deal size has grown by 100% from two years ago. “These are really good indicators that we have the right go to market,” he said.

The startup points to NTT Data as one example of a global deployment where Exabeam displaced multiple legacy SIEMs, and the company standardized on Exabeam going forward. Other customers include Levi Strauss & Co, ADP, Hulu, and Safeway.

Exabeam, launched in 2013, has its headquarters in San Mateo, California. Last week it opened an East Coast office in Atlanta.

Its platform collects unlimited amounts of data and uses machine learning-powered behavioral analytics to detect threats, in on-premises data centers and the cloud, as well as across IoT and other devices.

The idea here is to use machine learning (ML) to detect anomalous behavior so that humans — security operations centers (SOC) analysts — don’t need to manually analyze data logs and can instead spend their time responding to security threats.

Additionally, Exabeam uses a flat, user-based pricing model, which Polak says is another differentiator.

“Today security is a big data problem with IoT and the fact that there is no perimeter,” Polak said. “All those players I talked about, they all started way before big data and they built a quasi-big data database. And they monetize on that.”

These other SIEM products still need humans to do the same kind of threat hunting that Exabeam uses ML and data analytics to perform, he added. “Today the biggest problem in security is the shortage of talent and skill. Our proposition is: log as much data as you can, and machine learning automatically detects threats in that data and automatically responds to it, closing that skills gap.”

Exabeam used its $50 million Series D to develop its software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, Exabeam SaaS Cloud, which launched and was purchased by its first customer in the first quarter of this year. The company also expanded its sales team and partner program, which has more than 350 software and services vendors representing integrations with nearly 2,500 unique data sources and APIs.

At the time of its Series D, Exabeam Chief Marketing Officer Tim Matthews said the startup was looking to go public “in the next six to nine months.”

The company is targeting an initial public offering (IPO) “in the 2020 range” Polak said, “but it really depends on the market.” In the meantime, it will continue to grow and prepare to go public. To that end Exabeam recently hired its first chief financial officer, Manish Sarin from Proofpoint. “He’s leading the effort to make sure we’re preparing directly for not only the IPO but also the day after,” Polak said.