Click Security - a pioneer in real-time security analytics - today announced it has secured $17.7 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional participation from Citi Ventures and existing investor Sequoia Capital. The new funds bring total financing in the company to $24.7 million and will be used to expand sales, marketing and engineering initiatives.

Since initial venture funding - received in September 2011 - Click Security has rapidly gained traction in the security analytics market with key customer wins across financial services, higher education, and retail. Click Security's Real-time Security Analytics automates the finding of unknown cyber attack activity hidden in an organization's big data "haystack". The solution converts logs, flows, authentications and security events into contextual "actor-based" information - enabling security analysts to rapidly pinpoint anomalous activity through automated analytics and interactive visualization.

"Click's core technology and solution approach has the potential to reshape the manner and speed of modern threat detection, analysis and early stage response. There still remains a significant gap in the way organizations safeguard against sophisticated attacks, and Click is approaching this with a very interesting solution model," said Mike Goguen, Managing Partner, Sequoia Capital.

"The business of global cybercrime, by some estimates, now exceeds $300 billion annually. Traditional security defenses are clearly not getting the job done. We believe Click Security has developed a unique approach to providing real-time visibility into the unknown - representing a game changer for organizations looking to take back their networks," according to John Vrionis, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"Click Security has an approach that spotlights malicious activity early in a predictive, high accuracy and scalable manner. That combined with the potential for an analytic 'exchange' opens the door for a very different security analyst mindset. Using predictive analytics to police network activity more proactively is a key part of Citi's data security strategy, and it's an area of focus that we see as critical to the financial services industry," added Arvind Purushotham, Managing Director, Citi Ventures.

"Having the backing of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Citi Ventures, in addition to Sequoia Capital, is a strong endorsement of the potential for Real-time Security Analytics - and it is perfectly timed to meet the industry's mounting concern over cybercrime," said Marc Willebeek- LeMair, Click Security's Chief Executive Officer. "We experienced the security industry's shift from IDS to IPS when we founded TippingPoint a decade ago. Given the evolution of the hacker threat, complex and ever-changing attack surface, and constrained time and expertise of most security teams, the time has again come for a fundamentally new security approach. This additional funding will enable us to accelerate a number of development and sales initiatives required to address the high interest for real-time security analytics."

The recent funding follows a $7.0 million 2011 Series A round led by Sequoia Capital.

About Click Security

Click Security is disrupting the network security ecosystem with breakthrough data contextualization, visualization and analytics encoding required to automatically expose anomalous network activity before exfiltration or damage occurs. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company's focus on real-time analytics offers enterprises, higher education, critical infrastructure and government agencies a proactive security solution with unrivaled economics, high-speed performance and scalability. Please visit us at www.clicksecurity.com for more information or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/clicksecurity.

About Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm located in Menlo Park, California. Sequoia's diverse portfolio includes companies in energy, financial, health care, mobile and technology sectors. With its broad range of highly successful investments, Sequoia estimates that 19% of the NASDAQ's value is made up of firms in which they have invested.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management and investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, Lightspeed partners have backed more than 200 consumer, enterprise and cleantech companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth, Flixster, Fusion-io, Informatica, Kosmix, LivingSocial, Lucky Pai, Nicira, Playdom, Pliant Technology, Provigent, Riverbed Technology, Solazyme, TutorVista, Virsa Systems, Waveset, and XtremIO. www.lsvp.com

About Citi Ventures

Headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in New York, Shanghai and Singapore, Citi Ventures is a unit of Citi focused on equity investments, incubation and innovation. The Citi Ventures team partners with Citi businesses internally and with leading companies externally to identify, develop, and commercialize the highest new growth opportunities around the world that directly support Citi's emerging strategic directions.