Niara, a stealth security analytics company, today announced it has closed a $20 million Series B financing round led by Venrock, with additional participants including New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Index Ventures.

Doug Dooley, investor at Venrock, has joined the company's board of directors, which includes Series A investors Krishna Kolluri, general partner, NEA and Danny Rimer, partner, Index Ventures, as well as Aruba Networks president and CEO Dominic Orr.

'As the threat landscape has shifted from a world of black and white to shades of grey, traditional security technologies have become increasingly incapable of distinguishing what is malicious from what isn't,' said Sriram Ramachandran, co-founder and CEO of Niara. 'Cyber attacks are more sophisticated, persistent, and covert than ever before. Security teams need to identify and thread together subtle, nuanced changes in user behavior across disparate data sources to discover advanced threats. A combination of data-driven analytics and sophisticated forensics is critical to combatting these attacks and protecting your organization.'

'Venrock has a rich tradition of investing in teams with an incredible sense of innovation, and Niara has assembled a team of technologists with rich experience in security, networking, analytics and data science,' said Dooley. 'We've chosen to invest in Niara because of this team's unique approach to analytics that makes it easier for customers to find needles in their security haystack, shrinking the time it takes to discover sophisticated threats within their environments.'

The new funding brings Niara's total amount raised to $29.4 million. The company previously raised a $9.4m Series A round in November 2013, led by NEA and Index Ventures, with participation from several prominent individual investors.

'The market for security technology has shifted to the C-suite with a wave of high-profile incidents increasing the budgetary commitment organizations must make to keep their networks secure,' said Kolluri. 'We look forward to working with Sriram and his team as they democratize data science technology for the broader security market to provide the enterprise with the context and visibility necessary for a strong security posture.'

For more information please visit www.niara.com.

Additional Resources:

About Niara
Niara is a stealth security startup that delivers contextually relevant security analytics by fusing data from disparate sources to discover compromised users, provide insight into malicious insiders, enable advanced threat hunting efforts, and efficiently prioritize alerts for rapid investigation. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., the company is backed by Venrock, NEA, and Index Ventures. For more information, visit www.niara.com.

About Venrock
Originally established as the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family in 1969, Venrock partners with entrepreneurs to build some of the world's most disruptive, successful companies. With a primary focus on technology and healthcare, portfolio companies have included Apple Computer, athenahealth, Centocor, Check Point Software, DoubleClick, Endeca, Gilead Sciences, Idec Pharma, Imperva, Illumina, Intel, Millennium Pharma, Nest, SlideShare and Tudou. For more information, please visit Venrock's website at www.venrock.com and follow the firm on Twitter at @venrock.

About New Enterprise Associates
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With approximately $13 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company's lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record of successful investing includes more than 200 portfolio company IPOs and more than 320 acquisitions since its founding in 1977. In the U.S., NEA has offices in Menlo Park, CA; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China. For additional information, visit www.nea.com.

About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a multi-stage venture capital firm investing in technology and life science companies. Based in San Francisco, London and Geneva, Index is dedicated to supporting the best entrepreneurial teams looking to build market-defining, global businesses. Since its inception in 1996, Index has teamed-up with exceptional entrepreneurs in more than 20 countries, who are using technology to reshape every industry from gaming, media, retail and travel to education, financial services, security, storage and pharma -- and every other sector in between. The companies they've started include Climate Corp, Criteo, Dropbox, Etsy, Just Eat, King, Hortonworks, Lookout, MySQL, Nasty Gal, Pure Storage, Skype, SoundCloud, Sonos and Supercell -- among many others. More at www.indexventures.com.