Data protection and privacy startup BigID Inc. announced today that it has raised $70 million in new funding to deliver new applications for using data for data privacy, security and governance.

The Series D round was led by Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global and included Glynn Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Boldstart Ventures. The round was raised on a valuation of more than $1 billion, giving BigID unicorn status for the first time. Including the new funding, BigID has raised $216 million to date.

Founded in 2016, BigID develops and offers software that assists companies to secure customer data and to satisfy privacy regulations. The company’s platform uses advanced machine learning and what it calls “identity intelligence” that allows users to find, track and “de-risk” identity data stored on servers. It does so by automatically cataloging and mapping sensitive and personal data across an entire data environment, incorporating active metadata and classification.

The company’s service provides support for cloud, hybrid and on-premises data storage and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. The list of platforms and services supported is long, including Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3, MongoDB and SAP.

BigID pitches its services particularly to companies that are required to comply with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act. Both have come to dominate the vast majority of companies operating in the U.S. or Europe, giving BigID a huge potential market when it comes to companies seeking compliance solutions.

Nimrod Vax, co-founder and head of product at BigID, spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent Dec. 3, discussing a new approach to automated data discovery that enables easier compliance with data-privacy legislation.

Vax noted that, for example, both GDPR and CCPA grant covered citizens the right to be forgotten, meaning they can opt to have all of their data permanently deleted from a company’s database. “Organizations had no way of doing it because the tools that were available could not tell them whose data it is that they found,” Vax said.

Vax went on to explain that BigID has implemented a unique solution. “Instead of looking at the data, we started by looking at the identity, the people and finally looking at their data, learning how their data looks and then searching for that information,” Vax explained.

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