Network detection and response (NDR) provider Netography recently raised $45 million in a Series A funding round to enhance its security service that it calls an alternative to deep packet inspection.

Netography’s NDR service ingests customers' data and runs it through its detection engines to provide network visibility, attack detection, and mitigation options, according to Netography CEO Martin Roesch.

Roesch joined the company in September after co-founder Barrett Lyon moved to the role of chief architect alongside the other founder and CTO Dan Murphy. Prior to this role, Roesch founded the network security firm Sourcefire, which Cisco acquired for $2.7 billion in 2013. After the acquisition, Roesch joined Cisco as the chief architect for the security business group.

At Cisco, Roesch prepared a report that outlined problems the industry faced as networks became increasingly encrypted. One of the first suggested solutions was “exactly what Netography is doing,” he said. “The biggest problem in the market is that most of the security infrastructure is still based on the appliance model, and they're still doing what's called deep packet inspection,” which examines the full content of data packets and can’t penetrate encrypted traffic. 

However, as zero trust has evolved to more of a standard security strategy, and one of the primary zero-trust tactics is to encrypt all the network traffic, “deep packet inspection doesn't work very well,” he explained. 

In the NDR market, Roesch named Vectra AI, Darktrace, and ExtraHop as Netography’s competitors. “​​They all are built around those deep-packet inspection and appliance-based models,” he said. 

Netography, however, built a cloud-native, software-as-a-service offering. “So we have a lighter-weight deployment, we give you broader visibility, we give you faster time to value as well,” he added.

Netography’s $45 Million Series A follows a $2.6 million seed funding round in 2019.  

The company recently added two senior executives to its management team and plans to use the new funding to hire more employees, advance its technology innovations, and expand into more markets.

“We're hiring in all areas of the company,” Roesch said, including data scientists, machine learning, cloud computing, and security background professionals. He expects the vendor will add around 50 employees by the end of next year.

Looking to the future, the company plans to add features to its current product set and it aims to become one of the top vendors in the NDR space.

“The idea of Netography is building this massively scalable system that can do network detection and response based on data that we get from ‘living off the land’,” Roesch said. “Security for the atomized network is definitely something people are going to need to really consider, and I think we're going to be one of the leaders.”