Ballistic VC Leads $14.5M Round for Concentric

May 11, 2022
Karthik Krishnan
4 min read

Today I’m proud to announce that Concentric has closed our series A round of funding. Led by Ballistic Ventures, a new VC firm solely dedicated to advising and funding early-stage cybersecurity startups, this investment targets the $19B market for data security, access governance, and loss prevention. Citi Ventures also participated in the round as a strategic investment, as did current investors Core Ventures Group, Engineering Capital, and Clear Ventures. You can read our press release here.

Our mission is simple: We are remaking the multi-billion dollar data security market with an autonomous solution capable of discovering, evaluating, and protecting structured and unstructured content across the entire cloud and on-premises landscape. The teams at Ballistic and Citi Ventures are packed with high-powered cybersecurity creators and industry luminaries who see our potential and share our vision. Together we’ll establish Concentric as one of the industry’s leading cybersecurity players as we work to prevent data loss and breaches.

The genesis for Concentric AI arose from a conversation I had with a Chief Information Security Officer three years ago when he told me, “If I were to have a data security audit today, I would probably be fined.” He had no idea where his mission-critical data was – much less whether any of it was at risk. When we took this feedback out to the broader security community, we quickly realized that that CISO was not alone. Enterprises were struggling with their data security programs. Data volumes are growing exponentially, and mission-critical data has grown in complexity and variety. Personally identifiable information, financial data, intellectual property, business confidential content, and other business-critical data is sprawled across the entire network, from on-premises data stores to the cloud. And the consequences of inaction are only getting worse. According to the 2021 “Cost of a Data Breach” report from IBM, the cost of a data breach continues to climb up 10 percent YOY to $4.24M in 2021, with remote work contributing $1M more in average cost per data breach.

Data security shouldn’t be so hard. Concentric AI makes simple, effective data security available to everyone. We are pioneering the category of autonomous data security, using deep learning (as a form of advanced artificial intelligence) to provide a contextual understanding of mission-critical data and risk, along with tools for instant remediation. We work without cumbersome, hand-crafted rules and policies that, no matter how hard you try, still demand large teams to sift through the policy errors, rule updates, and false positives that are part and parcel of legacy approaches. 

Customers in diverse verticals from financial services to healthcare to high-tech to energy sectors are using us to detect and remediate common threats, such as:

  • Employees using personal email accounts to share sensitive information 
  • Inappropriate third-party access 
  • Oversharing or inappropriate access to confidential data within the company 
  • Sensitive data in the wrong location
  • Lateral movement of information across data stores  
  • Unusual account activity, such as ransomware attacks 
  • Operationalize data classification

Once we help customers discover their data, we identify what’s at risk. We help our customers across critical use cases, such as:

  • Data discovery and risk monitoring 
  • Cloud data security & governance
  • Data classification
  • Data access governance with remediation 
  • Privacy data protection 
  • Data management 

2021 was our first full year of shipping and we grew 400 percent year over year marked by customers in diverse verticals from financial services to healthcare to high-tech. We’ve also scaled our production deployments, today monitoring upwards of a petabyte of data per customer on average. We also have had 100% of our customers renew their engagements with Concentric, reflecting a highly satisfied customer base. We’ve proven that autonomous data security can happen at scale without burdening these security teams.

We’ll use the funding from this new round to accelerate our engineering and go-to-market efforts as we drive towards becoming a leader in delivering autonomous data security.

If this is a challenge that is something that you or the enterprises that you represent are facing, we would be delighted to come in and to be able to help. Concentric is securing the future of work with an agentless platform that is easy to deploy, and capable of delivering value in days without any upfront work on your part.  We offer a free-of-charge pilot program that requires very little time and effort from your teams. Using a sample of your data is the optimal way to see how effective our solution will be in your environment.  For more information, you can reach me at [email protected]. You can also get more information about us here.

concentric-logo

Libero nibh at ultrices torquent litora dictum porta info [email protected]

Getting started is easy

Start connecting your payment with Switch App.