Uptycs launched today with $13 million in funding and a security platform based on osquery, a  Facebook-developed universal open source endpoint agent.

The funding includes $3 million in seed money and a more recent $10 million Series A investment led by ForgePoint Capital and Comcast Ventures.

Osquery (pronounced “OS-query”) is an operating system (OS) instrumentation framework for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, an open source Unix-like OS. It  allows users to write SQL queries to explore OS data across Linux, Mac, and Windows environments as well as container and cloud workloads.

Facebook developed the security framework to monitor its own infrastructure before open sourcing it in 2014.

Enterprises use a variety of computing infrastructure, and this approach enables unified fleet visibility, intrusion detection, vulnerability management, and compliance across workloads, said Uptycs CEO and founder Ganesh Pai.

“What Uptycs brings to the table,” Pai said, “is once you deploy osquery, what does one do with all the collected data? How does that collected data get transformed into something useful?” The answer, he added, is his company’s platform. “The security use cases are primarily around intrusion detection, security and compliance, and vulnerability management.”

Uptycs culls all of that data at scale, regardless of the number of endpoints, and uses it to create dashboards, reports, and alerts. Security teams can then detect intrusions, discover vulnerabilities, and manage compliance. The software can be deployed on premises, or as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company got its start at Akamai Technologies, where Pai was chief architect, carrier products and strategy, before leaving in 2015 to start Uptycs.

“Almost 15 years ago when the team at Akamai was given a charter to come up a system for diagnostics, they chose SQL and abstracted the entire Akamai footprint to ask questions within SQL,” he said. “In 2015 when I left Akamai, we asked can we do something like this as a SaaS-based service?”

The startup has five paying customers and “a very healthy pipeline around 25-plus,” Pai said. It sees strong interest among large technology firms and mid-market cloud-native organizations.

“We feel we are in a very good trajectory to be extremely successful,” he added. “The No. 1 reason being the draft behind the open source endpoint agent. That’s very crucial because we collaborate with the open source community, and this information serves as an excellent basis to answer a lot of aggregate analytics questions. Osquery is consistently ranked No. 1 and No. 2 among all the open source security projects out there and that creates a healthy draft around companies like us because osquery is not easy to do something useful with.”

No. 2 is the growing popularity of Mac and Linux-based infrastructure. Traditional enterprise workloads are deployed on Windows, so that’s where malicious activity historically occurred. But now more companies are using Mac infrastructure and transitioning new workloads to Linux in the cloud. Companies need to monitor and secure these environments as well, and Uptycs’ security platform covers all of the above.

“And third, we know what it means to operate at very large scale,” Pai said. “Answers to security questions can be very quickly answered using this database approach.”