Concentric bags $45M to expand its AI-powered data cataloging tools – SiliconANGLE

Concentric Inc. said today it has closed on $45 million in a fresh round of funding led by Top Tier Capital Partners and HarbourVest Partners.

The Series B round also saw the participation of CyberFuture and existing investors like Ballistic Ventures, Engineering Capital, Clear Ventures and Citi Ventures, bringing the startup’s total amount raised to more than $67 million.

The company is targeting a global market for data access governance that’s expected to grow to more than $8 billion by 2027, and to do that it’s hoping to cater to companies that are awash in data they cannot easily protect. Its main product is a kind of data cataloging tool that uses AI to seek out all of a company’s information, including data that lives in infrequently accessed locations, and flag anything that’s in danger of being compromised.

According to Concentric, most enterprises today have a big problem when it comes to data inventory. The problem is that they have amassed so much business-critical data, and stored it in so many different places, that they cannot possibly hope to safeguard it all. The information is spread across disparate storage buckets on multiple cloud infrastructure platforms, software-as-a-service platforms, cloud-based file-storage and so on.

Despite this, most companies lack an efficient way to keep track of it. Concentric cites one survey that shows how more than 50% of enterprises rely on Excel spreadsheets as their main tool for data privacy and compliance reporting.

Using Concentric’s autonomous data cataloging tool, security teams have a much easier way to discover and evaluate their data, and remediate any issues that might put it at risk, without needing to hire teams of analysts or rely on end users to assist them.

Concentric’s tool works by linking to all of the company’s databases, data stores, email and messaging applications, as well as the SaaS platforms they use, and even generative AI chatbots such as Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot. Once everything is linked together, Concentric’s AI algorithms get to work, seeking out sensitive data such as passwords, private files, audio and video recordings of meetings and anything else of concern to security teams.

Having identified any data of concern, Concentric then provides recommendations to users on how they can better secure that information and ensure adherence to compliance standards. The tool can also trace data lineage, showing where a file originally came from and how it’s being used in the organization.

To ensure it doesn’t accidentally expose its customer’s data itself, Concentric makes sure that it doesn’t move any information from where it’s supposed to be. Instead, it creates semantic representations of the data it catalogs. So companies can trust that it doesn’t store any of their sensitive information.

The company claims that this kind of preventive data cataloging is one of the most effective strategies for cybersecurity. It points to IBM Corp.’s 2021 Cost of Data Breach report, which found that companies that adopt automated security tools can reduce the costs of a data breach by up to 84%.

Concentric co-founder and Chief Executive Karthik Krishnan said the company has enjoyed 300% year-over-year growth and has tripled customer count in less than six months, both off undisclosed bases, thanks to the rapid adoption of generative AI tools such as Microsoft’s Copilots. With today’s funding, the startup will look to expand its go-to-market strategies and speed up the development of its product.

Main image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer