Data governance and security startup Cyral raises $26M

Data security and governance startup Cyral today announced it has raised $26 million, bringing its total to date to $41.1 million. The company plans to put the funds toward expanding its platform and global workforce.

Managing and securing data remains a challenge for enterprises. Just 29% of IT executives give their employees an “A” grade for following procedures to keep files and documents secure, according to Egnyte’s most recent survey. A separate report from KPMG found only 35% of C-suite leaders highly trust their organization’s use of data and analytics, with 92% saying they were concerned about the reputational risk of machine-assisted decisions.

Redwood City, California-based Cyral, which was founded in 2018 by Manav Mital and Srini Vadlamani, uses stateless interception technology to deliver enterprise data governance across platforms, including Amazon S3, Snowflake, Kafka, MongoDB, and Oracle. Cyral monitors activity across popular databases, pipelines, and data warehouses — whether on-premises, hosted, or software-as-service-based. And it traces data flows and requests, sending output logs, traces, and metrics to third-party infrastructure and management dashboards.

Cyral can prevent unauthorized access from users, apps, and tools and provide dynamic attribute-based access control, as well as ephemeral access with “just-enough” privileges. The platform supports both alerting and blocking of disallowed accesses and continuously monitors privileges across clouds, tracking and enforcing just-in-time and just-enough privileges for all users and apps.

Identifying roles and anomalies

Beyond this, Cyral can identify users behind shared roles and service accounts to tag all activity with the actual user identity, enabling policies to be specified against them. And it can perform baselining and anomaly detection, analyzing aggregated activity across data endpoints and generating policies for normal activity, which can be set to alert or block anomalous access.

“Cyral is built on a high-performance stateless interception technology that monitors all data endpoint activity in real time and enables unified visibility, identity federation, and granular access controls. [The platform] automates workflows and enables collaboration between DevOps and Security teams to automate assurance and prevent data leakage,” the spokesperson said.

Existing investors, including Redpoint, Costanoa Ventures, A.Capital, and strategic investor Silicon Valley CISO Investments, participated in Cyral’s latest funding round. Since launching in Q2 2020, Cyral — which has 40 employees and occupies a market estimated to be worth $5.7 billion by 2025, according to Markets and Markets — says it has nearly doubled the size of its team and close to quadrupled its valuation.

“This is an emerging market with no entrenched solutions … We’re now working with customers across a variety of industries — finance, health care, insurance, supply chain, technology, and more. They include some of the world’s largest organizations with complex environments and some of the fastest-growing tech companies,” the spokesperson said. “With Cyral, our company was built during the pandemic. We have grown the majority of our company during this time, and it has allowed us to start our company with a remote-first business model.”

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