Cylance, fighting malicious hackers with AI, hits 1B valuation after raising 100M

"If you can't beat them, join them" may not sound like the most encouraging pitch for a cybersecurity company, but a startup called Cylance has created an artificial intelligence-powered brain that essentially does just that, and it has taken off -- raising 100 million in a Series D round of funding and catapulting itself into the so-called'unicorn' club of companies with 1 billion valuations. The Series D round of funding was led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, along with existing investors (unnamed which but previous backers include strategics like Capital One, Dell Ventures, DFJ, Fairhaven, Khosla, KKR and Ten Eleven). It takes the total raised to over 177 million. Cylance is not disclosing its valuation but a reliable source close to the company says it's in the neighborhood of 1 billion -- a figure also reported by the FT. Founded and led by Stuart McClure, a serial entrepreneur and former CTO of Intel's McAfee, Cylance's system is part of the rising wave of companies -- including biggies like IBM's Watson and Google's Brain -- that use machine learning and AI to build services that replicate or enhance human thinking to solve more complex problems that might be too challenging or cost prohibitive for a person (or even an army of people) to solve.