K2View Ltd. today announced that it has raised $28 million in funding to widen the adoption of its “micro-database” platform, which the startup says can reduce the risk of business records being hacked and simplify data projects.

Forestay Capital led the round with participation from Genesis Partners.

Dallas-based K2View sells a data management platform called K2View Fabric that’s positioned as an alternative to data warehouses and data lakes. The platform stores business records in the form of so-called entities. A “customer” entity, for instance, might include a given customer’s billing details and purchase history, while a “sensor” entity could contain all the measurements ever taken by an industrial sensor.

K2View Fabric keeps these records in what the startup refers to as micro-databases. Each mini-database stores just a single entity’s data, be it a sensor, customer profile or something else, and a company can have thousands or even millions of these mini-databases. In other words, whereas a traditional database stores a large amount of information in one repository, K2View Fabric stores smaller amounts of information in many repositories.

It’s that approach that K2View says sets its platform apart. Each micro-database is encrypted using a separate encryption key, which the startup claims reduces the risk of a large-scale data breach because a hacker would need to steal thousands of encryption keys or more to compromise all of a company’s information. Queries are faster too, because carrying out a request against a single entity’s worth of information is faster than running it on a large centralized database containing many different entities.

But though the security and performance features are notable selling points, it’s the ability to organize information into entities that has the most practical applications. K2View says its platform can be used to integrate records a company has scattered across different systems to make them easier to work with. For instance, if the information a retailer has about a given customer is divided among multiple accounting and marketing  systems, K2View Fabric can be used bring that information together in a single entity.

Unifying information in this way makes complying with privacy regulations easier because it gives enterprises a better view of what user data they possess. The startup also says its platform lends itself to other use cases including inventory management, customer analytics and fraud detection.

K2View claims its software is used by “some of the world’s largest companies” in industries including financial services, telecommunications and retail. Today’s funding round follows a period of expansion in which the startup’s revenue increased at a compound annual growth rate exceeding 75%. It plans to use the new funding to win more customers in vertical markets.

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