Highlights –
- Ever since it was born in 2015, Immuta has helped enterprises solve this problem by providing a universal dashboard to control data access and enforce policies.
- At the same time, its customer base, including Mercedes-Benz Group, Roche, the U.S. Army, and IAG, reported a two-fold increase.
Immuta, a Boston-based company, announced that it had raised USD 100 million in the E round of funding series. The cloud-native platform helps organizations automate security, compliance, privacy, and data access control.
Since the last decade, data governance and compliance have become crucial for enterprises. This is to not just keep customer data secure but to also help enterprises avoid heavy penalties levied by regulators for non-compliance. A Globalscape study reported that the cost of non-compliance can be almost three times more than the cost of compliance, which can go up to USD 14 million.
As enterprises continue to cope, the rules are getting even more complex, and associated data policies are also getting stringent. They are finding it difficult to manage who must be given access to data and for what purpose, leaving downstream users with either too little or too much access for their job.
Immuta offers a unified platform
Ever since it was born in 2015, Immuta has helped enterprises solve this problem by providing a universal dashboard to control data access and enforce policies. This solution automates identifying, categorizing, and tagging sensitive information by integrating with leading cloud data platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, etc. Once the data is identified, the platform offers self-service access to analytics and helps with access control management while complying with all necessary company policies. In addition, the platform helps monitor and analyze how the data is accessed, the purpose, and by whom, which helps streamline the entire process.
“If we think about the modern data stack, it’s about converging data sources so any user could potentially get on any data. And so, our goal is to break through the policy bureaucracy to allow a user instant access to the right data at the right time,” Matthew Carroll, CEO of Immuta, said.
As per the company’s website, data teams that use Immuta have been able to achieve compliance goals, speed up access to data by up to 100 times, and reduce the required number of policies by up to 75 times. The commercial ARR of the company grew by more than 100% in 2021. In between, its customer base, which includes giants such as Mercedes-Benz Group, Roche, the U.S. Army, and IAG, reported a two-fold increase.
Cutthroat competition
With an increase in demand, various enterprises have gained momentum in access and compliance management field. Top examples are – London-based Privitar that raised over USD 150 million, and Satori, which raised USD 20 million across multiple rounds. Other companies like LogicGate, TrustArc, OneTrust, and BigID are in the same league.
However, Carroll said there are three reasons why Immuta stands out from the crowd. The platform can be integrated with all leading cloud platforms, provides data use agreements combined with purpose-based access controls, and offers ease of authoring policies.
“There’s an ecosystem of really great companies that are in our kind. But, in reality, our biggest competitor is companies still trying to take 20 or 30 years of code they wrote in Teradata as they migrate to Snowflake and rewrite all that code, but at a cloud scale. 9.5 out of 10 times that is who we are competing with – companies trying to do it themselves,” he said.
Funding plans
NightDragon, a venture capital firm, led the current round of funding. With these funds, Immuta plans to focus on boosting product innovation and expand its sales, marketing, and customer teams to fulfil demands. The company also plans to strengthen strategic partnerships within the cloud data ecosystem and go ahead to make significant acquisitions for the betterment of its product.
The total capital raised by Immuta, including this round, is USD 267 million. Other investors like Intel Capital, Snowflake Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, IAG, March Capital, Wipro Ventures, Ten Eleven Ventures, and StepStone also participated.
Expert’s Take
“We’re going to be very aggressive, as the market kind of turns here, in some M and amp;A activities. Number two is to go fully global. We’ve been very fortunate to get customers in Japan, Australia, and throughout Europe and will continue to expand our globalization efforts… while extending our SaaS platform globally to ensure that we have data jurisdictions everywhere in the world. Finally, the last investment is R and amp;D. We believe that this next generation of data security is all about the user and all about the data at the same time. There’s a new zero-trust security for data and our goal is to build out effective monitoring capabilities to provide value to the legal teams as well as the security teams of our customers,” Matthew Carroll noted.