Boston-based cloud data access and security firm Immuta has raised $100 million in a Series E round led by NightDragon, and joined by new investor Snowflake Ventures (the VC arm of Snowflake), with participation from existing investors. The new funding brings the total raised to $267 million, and values the company at $1 billion.
The money will be used to accelerate product innovation; expand sales, marketing, and customer success teams; and deepen partnerships within the cloud data ecosystem. The company has been expanding rapidly throughout 2021, increasing commercial annual recurring revenue (ARR) by more than 100%, doubling its customer base, and continuing its global expansion into EMEA and APJ.
As cloud migration, corporate data and security threats all continue to grow, the ability to locate and access data securely becomes more pressing. “Immuta discovers, secures, and monitors an organization’s data to ensure that users have access to the right data at the right time – as long as they have the rights,” explains Immuta CEO and co-founder Matthew Carroll.
The four primary capabilities of the platform are attribute-based access control (ABAC); discovery and classification; policy enforcement and auditing; and masking and anonymization.
“ABAC is the underlying innovation for policy enforcement around which our platform is built to provide end to end data discovery, security, and monitoring,” Carroll told SecurityWeek. Rather than requiring rules to be defined in advance – like the more common rule-based access control (RBAC) – ABAC applies policy dynamically at query time based on metadata and attributes.
The effect can be a dramatic reduction in the number of required access policies. “We had one customer who went from having almost 400 pages of rules on data to having just 54 global policies with Immuta,” said Carroll.
Discovery and classification involves automatically scanning the customer’s cloud data, detecting the sensitive data, and generating standard tagging across multiple compute platforms. “This eliminates manual errors while providing universal data access control and visibility into sensitive data,” comments Carroll.
Policy enforcement and auditing is delivered by automatically enforcing access control policies on every query. Audit logs are captured, “so data teams can be confident data is used securely, and can prove compliance with rules and regulations,” he continued.
Masking and anonymization is provided by Immuta’s own privacy enhancing technologies to accelerate data sharing use cases. These technologies are supported by Immuta’s legal engineers.
“There is a major shift in the modern data stack as organizations scale to derive value from their data more quickly, while also protecting their data assets and adhering to privacy regulations,” said Carroll. “We’ve entered the next wave of the cloud data evolution where automation and security are essential to meeting modern cloud and data demands. This new funding will help propel Immuta into our next phase of growth as we continue to revolutionize cloud data access and data security.”
Immuta was founded in 2015 by Matthew Carroll (CEO), Michael Schiller (chief customer office), Sapan Shah (senior software development engineer), and Steven Touw (CTO). It raised $90 million in a Series D round in May 2021.
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