In light of the Black Hat Conference this week in Las Vegas, security startup Distil announced today a $21 million Series C round to expand on its Bot Detection and mitigation services.  CEO Rami Essaid says the company may use the funds to make an acquisition or to improve its software and bring it products to market quicker.

Since the company was founded five years ago, it has spent two years in research and development and has raised a total of $65 million focused on expanding its core product, Bot Detection.

A big portion of this funding will go to research and development, but it will also help in taking the software into other layers of deployment such as the network layer, Essaid explains.

Instead of selling a box or piece of hardware, Distil offers its product as software-as-a-service (SaaS), or software-defined security, Essaid says. This allows the software to be deployed on almost any platform and for instant updates.

“It is very easy to stand still in the security industry. We update our info minute-by-minute, pushing new malicious information, and every two weeks, we release a new product update with the info,” Essaid says.

Distil works with all sizes of companies and views even a $500 customer as a valuable asset. Its philosophy is that the more data it’s able to collect, the better it is able to identify newer and more sophisticated bots.

In December, Distil acquired ScrapeSentry with the help of a $21 million Series B. ScrapeSentry was a team of analysts that understood the security space and web traffic. “They offered professional services and were able to come in and act as consultants to our customers. We just took over management of their software and applied it towards our customers and their needs,” Essaid says.