Prelert, the anomaly detection company, today announced it has raised a $7.5 million round of venture capital financing from Intel Capital and existing investors, Fairhaven Capital and Sierra Ventures. This investment will enable Prelert to further expand its field sales and engineering organizations to leverage the growing interest in Anomaly Detective from enterprises, cloud service providers and IT management providers.

As IT security and operations professionals struggle to find actionable insight within the overwhelming volume of machine-generated big data that their systems create, Prelert offers a solution to easily find operational threats, issues and opportunities as they are occurring. Using unsupervised machine learning technology, Prelert's Anomaly Detective processes huge volumes of streaming data to learn what normal behavior looks like within an IT environment, and in real time, flags anomalous activity.

'Enterprise IT environments are simply becoming too big and complex for humans to manage,' said Jason Waxman, vice president of Cloud Platforms Group at Intel. 'Traditional methods of IT security and operations management are quickly becoming ineffective because of the amount of data being created, and the industry needs solutions to this challenge that democratize data science. The Anomaly Detective engine empowers companies to easily identify opportunities and threats within their data, and we're excited to help further development and usage of this unique and important technology through our investment.'

Traditional approaches to IT security and performance management have not scaled to provide actionable insight as the volume of data that modern IT environments create has grown to as much as terabytes per hour. Because they require human defined rules that can never cover every contingency, thousands of false alerts are generated every day, which often mask important notifications. The volume of data generated requires time-consuming and costly data mining technology, or a team of data scientists to find critical information within this data. Prelert turns this approach on its head by cutting through the noise and automatically identifying security threats and performance issues, enabling companies to improve the security and service levels of their IT systems while reducing overall costs.

'We've seen far too many instances where major corporations find out too late that cybercriminals have had free reign on their networks for weeks or even months,' said Mark Jaffe, Prelert's CEO. 'These increasingly sophisticated hackers know how to sneak around tripwires set by most security teams but can not avoid leaving fingerprints in the form of anomalous behaviors. The volume and complexity of the data that must be analyzed to find those fingerprints require an automated solution to ferret out malicious activity. Prelert is a first mover in providing the type of meaningful big machine data analytics that operations and security executives have been searching for.'

Prelert's technology has been proven through more than 100 successful enterprise installations as a deeply integrated app for Splunk and through partnerships that address IT security and APM use cases, including OEM relationships with Alert Logic and CA Technologies. In addition, the company recently opened its API, allowing developers, cloud service providers and technology vendors to integrate is machine learning engine into their environments, and has started offering connectors to the most popular big data technologies such as Elasticsearch. The funding will be used to expand Prelert's engineering and sales teams to help accelerate these types of partnerships and integrations, as well as the growing number of deployments of the technology in enterprises.

The Intel Capital investment was led by Director Sean Cunningham.

About Prelert

Prelert is the anomaly detection company. Its automated behavioral analytics make it easy for users and developers to uncover real-time insights into the operational opportunities and risks hidden in massive data sets. By using unsupervised machine learning technology, Prelert enables non-data scientists to go beyond the limits of search to quickly derive value from their organization's data. To learn more, please visit www.prelert.com or follow @Prelert.

About Intel Capital

Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, mobility, consumer Internet, digital media and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$11 billion in over 1,400 companies in 57 countries. In that timeframe, 209 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 363 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2013, Intel Capital invested US$333 million in 146 investments with approximately 49 percent of funds invested outside North America. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.