Data Privacy Startup Privacera Raises More Cash

(Photon photo/Shutterstock)

Growing demand for data governance, privacy and security tools needed to comply with an expanding list of national data-privacy rules continues to attract investors as more sensitive data shifts to the cloud.

The latest example comes from data privacy startup Privacera, which this week announced a $50 million funding round led by new investor Insight Partners. Privacera said Tuesday (March 9) it would use the funding to extend its unified data governance and privacy platform across Databricks, Snowflake and other cloud-based data services.

Also participating in the Series B round were Battery Ventures and Sapphire Ventures along with existing investors Accel, Cervin and Point 72.

According to the website Crunchbase.com, the startup has so far raised $67.3 million.

The steady migration of infrastructure and data to the cloud along with a growing list of compliance standards has seeded the data governance and security markets for startups such as Privacera.

Based in Fremont, Calif., Privacera currently provides automated detection of sensitive data, data encryption and access controls for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure along with Databrick and Snowflake. The value proposition is automated, consistent data governance and regulatory compliance across a customer’s on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

Customers are using Privacera’s cloud-based software services to comply with a growing number of national data protection regulations. In a testimonial, customer iFood’s said it used the startup’s software services to support its Databricks environment with no changes to existing code when connecting to AWS S3 storage.

Privacera’s co-founders—Balaji Ganesan and Don Bosco Durai—are the creators of Apache Ranger, a framework for monitoring and managing data security across Hadoop platforms. CEO Ganesan is a survivor of the January 2009 water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.

The duo previously co-founded XA Secure, which specialized in access controls for Hadoop. That startup was acquired in 2014 by Hortonworks (now part of Cloudera). The access control product eventually morphed into Apache Ranger. They also helped develop Apache Atlas while at Hortonworks.

Since founding Privacera in 2016, they have used those two open source technologies as the basis for a solution that helps customers discover and catalog sensitive data across all of their data stores, both cloud and on-premise using Apache Atlas. It then allows users to access it using fine-grained access via Apache Ranger.

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