Introducing Immuta, a category-defining tool for enterprise data governance and our latest portfolio company in edge cloud

As part of our edge cloud investment strategy, we looked into real-time data developments that are co-travelers with 5G and edge deployments. We identified enterprise data governance as an attractive market opportunity for new companies.

The data governance market is large and growing rapidly, driven by three trends. Firstly, a growing number of regulations across geographies aimed at protecting personal data is adding pressure to companies’ abilities to handle vast amounts of data. Secondly, the adoption of multi-cloud strategies, which adds new sources and destinations for data outside the historical security perimeter, and thirdly, the rise of data-driven decisions, which require ingesting and analyzing data from disparate sources in real-time.

Formalizing data governance

As enterprises move data into cloud data platforms, they are experiencing a paradigm shift in the way data and business teams collaborate. Business teams aiming to monetize data assets want a consolidated view of data, enabling them to mitigate risks, target valuable customers, and evaluate business performance. DataOps, a new parallel function to DevOps, is primarily concerned with providing the right data at the right time while staying compliant with the laws of the land.

Policy compliance can be daunting. The average large enterprise has nearly 500,000 policies that need to be applied in real-time to comply with regulatory and company-specific oversight. DataOps is tasked with implementing compliance mandates and DIY policy engines often struggle to scale as data use expands.

Enter Immuta, the leading company reinventing data policy enforcement. With its inline approach, Immuta is designed for both data engineers tasked with handling business data with care, and compliance officers enforcing new policies. Organizationally, Immuta has become the tool of choice to bring data, compliance, and business teams closer together, enabling enterprises to achieve data-driven agility, innovation, and competitiveness. We also see Immuta’s approach as the most scalable way to apply data governance to the growing edge cloud.

“As expansion stage investors, we look for companies that have found a great insertion point into markets with unlimited potential and have tenacious teams that can ride the high growth that comes with it. Immuta, with its data governance category leadership and rockstar team, is a prime example.”

Ready to scale

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Immuta as part of their $90M Series D financing round, joining Greenspring Associates, March Capital, Intel Capital, Greycroft, and other investors. Here are three reasons why we invested in Immuta:

• Founder-product-market fit: Immuta’s founding team (Matthew Carroll, Steve Touw and Michael Schiller) bring excellent preparation to this problem space, having worked together analyzing the world’s most complex datasets supporting the U.S. Intelligence Community. The CEO, Matt Carroll, was CTO of CSC’s Defense Intelligence Group and previously served in Iraq as an US Army Intelligence Officer. Matt has a deep understanding of the high utility of key data in making field decisions and is a skilled leader, defining challenging missions and motivating his team to achieve great things.
• Indispensable to customers: While data governance has been a need in the last few years, recent market shifts and cloud adoption have helped Immuta’s SaaS product expand to the broader enterprise market. Sophisticated customers are now familiar with the pitfalls of building custom DIY tools and design in Immuta from the start. In our reference calls during the investment diligence process, many customers spoke about championing Immuta with their own colleagues, advocating its value as new groups started data integration projects.

"The Edge Cloud is an additional 10x growth driver for data governance that we can help the company navigate.”

• Partner driven: Webscalers such as AWS have started capitalizing on data gravity, the tendency of applications to follow data into the cloud. More recently, multi-cloud data exchanges from Snowflake and analytical data systems from Databricks offer unified data platforms that help enterprise users create intelligence from disparate data sources. Immuta, with its data governance solution which can span across clouds, serves as a natural, neutral partner to these players. This partner “push and pull” between Immuta and cloud data platforms creates a scalable go-to-market motion, where Immuta both enables and benefits from the larger data system sale.

We are excited that Immuta has chosen to partner with us on this leg of their journey. If you want to discuss edge cloud investing with us, please reach out!

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