Security vendor Hunters scored $68 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $118 million. The cash infusion comes on the heels of a shift from a “vaguely-defined” open extended detection and response (XDR) to security operations center (SOC) capabilities.

Founded in late 2018, Hunters originally developed automated threat hunting capabilities and was known for its open-XDR platform that it billed as vendor-agnostic threat detection and response platform capable of ingesting security telemetry from any source.

The vendor scored $30 million to grow the platform last August. However, Hunters has since pivoted to a SOC platform.

The team realized “our platform is actually able to deliver value to more workloads in the SOC like alert staging and investigation, etc.,” Hunters CEO Uri May told SDxCentral. “And then gradually, we started to grow with our product and also an offering to what we have today, which is basically a SOC platform.”  

May described it as an “important maturity process” for the company. “It just happened very fast," he said.

The progression helped Hunters to compete with vendors like Splunk and Elastic Stack, and replace existing security information and event management (SIEM), he added.

“The SIEM market is worth $4.3 billion and is ripe for disruption since it drives limited security outcomes for its customers,” May said in a statement. “Hunters was purposely built to help the overly stressed security teams mitigate real security incidents faster and more effectively.”

Another reason Hunters chose to define itself as a SOC platform is that it makes the products “way more understandable and approachable,” May claimed. 

“Our challenge with XDR is because so many vendors are using it in so many different ways. Customers are left very confused. The definition for XDR is very vague,” he added. “We were all in on XDR … from day one. We just at some point understood that customers don't necessarily understand what it means, and then we added a layer of SOC platform.”

Hunters’ latest funding round was led by Equity firm Stripes with participation from new investors Cisco Investments, DTCP, and Databricks. Snowflake Ventures also participated.

Snowflake was one of Hunters’ first customers using its then XDR platform and now its SOC offerings. 

“We're basically allowing snowflake customers to ingest and collect, using Hunters, all of their security data into Snowflake. And then have all of Hunters’ analytic stack sit on top of that data,” May explained, adding the integration gives customers data ownership, privacy, and compliance regulation without vendor lock.

Hunters plans to integrate with other data platforms, including Databricks, when it launches later this year. 

Finally, Hunters partnered with DTCP and Cisco to expand its reach, May said. “We are hoping to be the platform that brings together all of Cisco's technologies, but then also integrates them to all of the other technologies.”

Hunters hopes these partnerships will extend its addressable market. The company has a "double-digit" customer count, including Booking.com, Snowflake, Netgear, and Cimpress

The vendor is primarily focusing on the U.S. market but does have a presence in Western Europe. Hunters is assessing an expansion into the Asia Pacific region in 2023, according to May. 

To support these goals, Hunters plans to double its headcount this year.