BigID Raises $30 Million Series B To Help Corporations Locate And Protect Sensitive Data

These days, companies with “Big Data” can face some big problems.

Between the looming threat of security breaches by ever-more sophisticated intruders, new government regulations like GDPR, and a changing landscape of tools used to manage sensitive information, there’s a lot to lose if something goes wrong.

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The challenge many companies face is figuring out what, exactly, they have to lose. Eighteen-year technology veteran Dimitri Sirota, co-founder and CEO of BigID,  colorfully characterized the company as “an old-school Israeli cybersecurity firm” focused on data privacy and protection. The company is based in New York, but its engineering headquarters is located in Tel Aviv.

And BigID is moving fast.

Today, BigID announced that it’s raised a $30 million Series B round less than five months after it closed $14 million in a Series A. The company’s Series B round was led by a new investor to the company, Scale Venture Partners. Other participants in the round include prior investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners, and SAP.io. Ariel Tseitlin, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, joins BigID’s board as part of the transaction.

Taken together with its prior rounds, BigID has raised a total of $46.1 million in venture funding to date. It’s a hefty sum for a company founded in 2016 that only started piloting its platform with prospective customers in Q2 2017. The company plans to use its new funds to continue to scale its go-to-market efforts and accelerate product introductions as it strives to become a standard for enterprise privacy management and personal data protection.

Companies often don’t know what data they’ve got until it’s gone (or subject to new regulation), so BigID paves the way for companies to protect, manage, and control personally identifiable user and employee information. Its AI-powered platform traverses a company’s disparate data stores, giving executives and technical administrators insights into what data they have, whose data they have, and how it’s being used (or misused).

According to a statement from the company, “BigID’s advanced privacy automation technology provides enterprises a first-of its kind ability to address critical privacy requirements like right to be forgotten and data usage record keeping at petabyte scale, across any data, on-premises or in the cloud.” As the European Union and other governing bodies ponder and pass privacy laws, enforcement of these laws act as a forcing function for enterprises to adopt stricter, more modern methods of data protection and management.

In an interview with Crunchbase News, Sirota said that the company is growing very quickly, to the point that it’s tough to keep up with demand. He said he could “double” his sales team “and still keep everyone busy” as the company partners with corporations, big system integrators, and value-added resellers. Sirota declined to comment on its customers.

I asked Sirota what the average person might not understand about data privacy. “They don’t realize how poorly executed data privacy is done in even the most sophisticated companies,” he said. Companies have spent so much time aggregating and analyzing data, but not nearly enough time accounting for it. Such an accounting system may add up to big business for BigID, or so Sirota hopes.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias