Cybersecurity startup Sentra raises $30 million to help firms find and classify all their cloud data
Israeli cloud security startup Sentra Inc. today announced that it has completed a $30 million funding round, bringing its total capital raised to more than $53 million.
The Series A financing comes just over four months after the company entered the U.S. market with technology that it says can discover all of an organization’s cloud data, classify it according to sensitivity and recommend remediation plans for data security teams. Sentra’s agentless product is tuned for data discovery across multiple clouds and can not only find sensitive data based upon samples provided by customers but also determine characteristics such as access permissions and use of encryption.
The company says it’s addressing a problem cloud infrastructure has introduced, which is that it’s often moved or copied without adequate tracking. “In every proof of concept we’ve run, we’ve found sensitive data in the cloud that customers didn’t know they had,” Chief Executive Yoav Regev told SiliconANGLE last September.
In the 18 months since it was founded, Sentra has signed up “dozens” of paying customers, Regev said. Its two primary plans for the new funds are to expand its U.S. footprint with the addition of “a couple of dozen people over the next year” and to broaden both the range of data types it can detect and the characteristics of that data.
Find it all
“We want to be able to find any piece of data in the environment and tell you about it,” Regev said. For example, “We want to be sure we have everything about data access and data movement. We want to correlate any piece of data with any other piece of data so we can tell if you have data in more than one place.”
Sentra was recently recognized by Gartner Inc. as a sample vendor in its 2022 Hype Cycle Report in the new category of Data Security Posture Management, which Gartner defines as a class of product that “provides visibility as to where sensitive data is, who has access to that data, how it has been used and what the security posture of the data store or application is.”
Regev said Sentra is focused on not being yet another addition to the burdensome bouquet of cybersecurity products that most enterprises already own. “We run behind the scenes and connect to nearly any other product in your environment seamlessly,” he said. “Customers want use to orchestrate and be part of their ecosystem.”
The funding round was led by the Standard Investments arm of Standard Industries Inc. with participation from Munich Re Ventures LLC, Moore Strategic Ventures LLC, Xerox Ventures LLC and INT3 Ventures Inc. as well as seed-round investors Bessemer Venture Partners LP and Zeev Ventures LLC.
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