Immuta Raises $100M Series E as the Latest Data Access Unicorn

Data access platform provider Immuta announced it has raised $100 million in a Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation, bringing the company’s total funding to $267 million and making it the latest unicorn.

The Series E round was led by NightDragon, and also includes new investor Snowflake Ventures, the venture capital arm of the data cloud company, as well as participation from existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, DFJ Growth, IAG, Intel Capital, March Capital, StepStone, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Wipro Ventures.

Immuta plans to use the funds to fuel its next phase of growth which includes strategic acquisitions, product innovation, partnerships, and global expansion, according to a blog post from Immuta CEO Matthew Carroll. He says the company’s goal is to provide the best data security and privacy for its customers to scale successfully in the cloud.

“There is a major shift in the modern data stack as organizations scale to derive value from their data more quickly, while also protecting their data assets and adhering to privacy regulations,” said Carroll. “We’ve entered the next wave of the cloud data evolution where automation and security are essential to meeting modern cloud and data demands. This new funding will help propel Immuta into our next phase of growth as we continue to revolutionize cloud data access and data security.”

Immuta’s platform includes an explainable policy builder that allows users to author policies in plain English. Source: Immuta

The current push for more efficiency and scalability for data access brings with it issues of privacy, security, ethics, and compliance and can lead to imbalances within organizations’ data initiatives. There are more rules and regulations to contend with, especially as companies scale up. Immuta said some of its customers approached it for help with this issue, as their legacy access control technologies were no longer cutting it for enterprise level businesses in a cloud based world. A recent Immuta and 451 Research survey found that “84% believe data privacy and security requirements will limit access to data at their organizations over the next 24 months.”

Immuta says it is solving that “data dilemma” with its Data Access Platform that “enables organizations to discover, protect, and monitor sensitive data so that users can access it – as long as they have the rights.” The company says it offers customers the ability to easily enforce their data security policies while securing data in the cloud at a more granular level. The Immuta platform automatically enforces data policies across integrated cloud platforms (including Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon, Google, Azure, and Starburst) and distributes data access responsibility, which the company says simplifies and decentralizes data policy management. Teams can author data policies once and then ubiquitously enforce them.

“No other product does attribute-based access control (ABAC) like Immuta. ABAC fundamentally shifts the way organizations manage data access without increasing risk or complexity,” said Carroll in his blog post. “Organizations can reduce the number of policies required by 75x, while also speeding up data access by 100x. Before, it may have taken hours or days to grant secure data access and that complex process becomes completely automated.”

Immuta allows teams to limit data use to specific purposes, and consent workflows, like the one shown here, create attribute based controls. Source: Immuta

The data governance market itself is growing and will be worth $6 billion by 2026, according to a Global Industry Analysts report. Immuta’s products, partnerships, enthusiastic customers, and funding allude to its continued progress in the data access category.

“As the threat landscape continues to escalate and cloud migration continues, we’re seeing increased global interest in the need for secure data access solutions,” said Dave DeWalt, former CEO of FireEye, McAfee, Documentum and now Founder and Managing Director at NightDragon. “Immuta is the clear market leader in providing secure data access, providing data teams with one universal platform to control access to data at scale. Many of the world’s top data-driven organizations – Roche, Mercedes-Benz Group, IAG, and the U.S. Army – rely on Immuta every day to quickly, safely, and efficiently share more data with more users. We’re excited to be making this investment in such a critical part of the modern data stack.”

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