When we started Concentric AI five years ago, it was obvious that enterprises had a massive data security problem. On one hand, data volumes were growing, data was sprawled across their environments – both cloud and on-premises – and the nature of business-critical data spanned the gamut from IP to financial data to business confidential data to PII/PCI/PHI. And on the other hand, customers were still relying on age old techniques – from cumbersome rule writing to pattern matching to complex policies just to answer basic questions on where their sensitive data might be. It also meant that if you don’t know what you have, you can’t protect it.
These are the challenges we set out to solve:
- An army of people is needed to deal with the false positives and false negatives. Even today, one CISO told me he was spending $5 USD on people for every dollar in solution costs.
- Years of effort and organizations are still unable to successfully answer basic questions about where their sensitive data is, much less being able to understand where risk is to that data from inappropriate access, risky sharing, wrong entitlements, etc., or how protect it.
- Operationalizing data security remains a huge challenge, and it is a mind-boggling thing to say, given that any and all security measures enacted by any enterprise really have only one goal in mind – protecting data.
What was puzzling and exciting at the same time was how such a foundational part of an enterprise security stack had remained so underserved and unfulfilled area for so long… Thus Concentric AI was born.
When we started Concentric AI, the underlying assumptions we made were:
- Our solution would not rely on manual rules and regex to solve the problem of data discovery. My co-founder Madhu had the brilliant insight – in 2019 no less – that transformers and language models could provide a level of semantic understanding of data that would far exceed what regex or pattern-based understanding of data could.
- We knew that data discovery is a means to an end, and we had to help enterprises understand where there was risk to their data from excessive permissioning, inappropriate entitlements, risky sharing, unauthorized access; as well as remediate – from classification to permissions and sharing management to moving/archiving/migrating data.
- We were firm believers that our culture was the only thing that would serve as our backbone and North Star. We had to explicitly define what we wanted our culture to be, so we codified it down and we live by these words every day.
- I was certain that we were in the “making people – our customers and partners – successful business”. Data security just happened to be the vehicle to fulfil this mission.
Five years later, these are the lessons we’ve learned:
- We knew financial services and healthcare would care about this problem, but we have been blown away by how many verticals and disciplines struggle to protect their data. From universities to food producers to oil and gas firms to consulting companies – everyone has some data or another worth protecting, and they are all looking for the easy button to make this happen. From pork producers to hedge funds to industrial manufactures to healthcare companies, we have customers in at least 12 different verticals using Concentric AI to help discover, monitor and protect their data.
- You might be a F500 manufacturing firm or a hedge fund – You simply don’t have the manpower to deploy, administer and manage these solutions. Autonomous data security governance that allows customers to discover, monitor and protect their data with ease is the future.
- We never could have imagined that the enterprise would replace their 15-year-old legacy existing data access governance deployments with Concentric AI as their defacto data security governance platform within a few weeks of POVing our product – but they have.
Every startup goes through its difficulties. Ours ranged from dealing with COVID for two years to waking up one morning not knowing if our deposits were safe as Silicon Valley Bank imploded to a recession watch and inflation. We have persevered and emerged stronger on the other side for it. For example:
- Our customers love our product, and many have deployed data classification, data permissions governance, and data migration at PBs of scale, and we have helped them remediate risk.
- We have hit 300% YOY growth, tripled our customer count in the past six months and doubled our employee count in the past year.
- We are blessed with investors who see what we see…an opportunity to build a transformational, multi-generational data security company that can be the defacto data security governance platform for the enterprise – delivering discovery, monitoring , protection, investigation, and compliance all rolled into a single platform that can be the one stop shop for all your data security, management and compliance needs.
- This current round of funding allows us to accelerate our engineering, sales and marketing investments to be able to fulfil that vision worldwide.
- We are grateful to our existing investors – Ballistic Ventures, Engineering Capital, Citi Ventures, Clear Ventures, Homebrew and Core Ventures Group – for their unwavering support and we welcome Top Tier Capital Partners, CyberFuture and HarbourVest to the Concentric AI family.
Today’s news is both a testament to everything that has been accomplished so far and a reminder that this is another step in our milestone journey. The challenge and opportunity are that we are just getting started.