Immuta nabs $100M to accelerate data access for enterprise users

Boston-based Immuta, which provides a cloud-native platform to help organizations automate data access control, security, privacy and compliance, today announced it has raised $100 million in a series E round of funding.

In the last decade or so, data governance and compliance have become major focus areas for enterprises. The need is not just to keep customer data safe but also to avoid heavy fines proposed by regulators. After all, according to a study from Globalscape, the cost of non-compliance can be nearly three times higher than the cost of compliance at more than $14 million. 

As these efforts continue, organizations are dealing with a growing web of complex rules and regulations and associated data policies. They are finding it difficult to manage who can access what data and for what purpose, leaving downstream users with too much or too little access for their job.

Immuta’s unified platform

Founded in 2015, Immuta strives to solve this problem by providing enterprises with a universal dashboard to enforce policies and control data access. The solution integrates with leading cloud data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, etc.) to automate the discovery, classification and tagging of sensitive information. Then, once the data is discovered, the platform delivers self-service access to analytics and enables access control management on the information while complying with all company policies. The platform also continues to monitor and audit how the data in question is accessed, by whom and for what purpose, streamlining the whole process.

“Users author policies into Immuta and then we enforce them. These policies can be regulatory, contractual or just internal business rules. We connect to the data, control it with policy enforcement and audit across all those ecosystems consistently,” Matthew Carroll, CEO of Immuta, told VentureBeat.

“If we think about the modern data stack, it’s about converging data sources so any user could potentially get on any data. And so, our goal is to break through the policy bureaucracy to allow a user instant access to the right data at the right time,” he added.

According to the company’s website, data teams using Immuta were able to speed up access to data by up to 100 times and decrease the number of policies required by up to 75 times – all while achieving their compliance goals. In 2021, the company saw its commercial ARR grow by more than 100%. Meanwhile, its customer base, which includes giants like Roche, Mercedes-Benz Group, IAG and the U.S. Army, surged twofold. 

Growing competition

A number of enterprises are gaining momentum in the access and compliance management space. Satori recently raised $20 million, while London-based Privitar has raised over $150 million across multiple rounds. TrustArc, BigID, OneTrust and LogicGate are also treading the same path.

However, Carroll says Immuta stands out from the crowd with three core elements – native integration with all leading cloud platforms, ease of authoring policies and data use agreements combined with purpose-based access controls.

“There’s an ecosystem of really great companies that are in our kind. But, in reality, our biggest competitor is companies still trying to take 20 or 30 years of code they wrote in Teradata, as they migrate to Snowflake, and rewrite all that code, but at cloud scale. 9.5 out of 10 times that is who we are competing with – companies trying to do it themselves,” he said.

Funding plans

With this round of funding, which was led by venture capital firm NightDragon, Immuta will focus on accelerating product innovation, as well as expanding sales, marketing and customer success teams to meet demand. The company will also deepen its strategic partnerships within the cloud data ecosystem and make some major acquisitions to strengthen its product.

“We’re going to be very aggressive, as the market kind of turns here, in some M&A activities. Number two is to go fully global. We’ve been very fortunate to get customers in Japan, Australia, and throughout Europe and will continue to expand our globalization efforts… while extending our SaaS platform globally to ensure that we have data jurisdictions everywhere in the world. Finally, the last investment is R&D. We believe that this next generation of data security is all about the user and all about the data at the same time. There’s a new zero-trust security for data and our goal is to build out effective monitoring capabilities to provide value to the legal teams as well as the security teams of our customers,” Carroll noted.

This round takes the total capital raised by Immuta to $267 million. It also saw participation from Snowflake Ventures and existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, DFJ Growth, IAG, Intel Capital, March Capital, StepStone, Ten Eleven Ventures and Wipro Ventures.