A group of prominent investors have provided Privacera Inc. with $50 million in fresh funding to boost the growth of the startup’s data governance platform, which helps enterprises manage employee access to sensitive information.

Fremont, California-based Privacera disclosed the investment today. Insight Partners led the round with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Accel, Cervin and Point 72.

Many of the analytics services and other platforms in which enterprises keep their data provide controls for managing employee access to records. Administrators can use those controls to ensure that each employee can only view information they strictly need for their work. Minimizing how much information is accessible from user accounts is not only useful from a cybersecurity standpoint, but is also important to complying with privacy regulations such as GDPR. 

The challenge is that disparate data platforms’ access controls are often isolated from another one. As a result, information technology teams at large enterprises have to manually set data access rules across as many as dozens of different services. The task can require significant resources and is often error-probe because of the sheer amount of manual work involved. 

Enter Privacera’s platform. It provides a centralized console that allows administrators to define information access rules across multiple environments in one place. Privacera supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud. It also works with popular analytics solutions such as the Snowflake data warehouse and Databricks.

Privacera is based on Apache Ranger, an open-source data security framework for managing access to information stored in analytics applications. The startup’s founding team includes the original creators of the framework.

Since its launch in 2016, Privacera has racked up multiple Fortune 500 customers across markets that include as retail and finance. The startup says that its annual recurring revenue rose 250% in 2020, off an undisclosed base, thanks to strong demand. To keep up revenue growth, Privacera said it will use the capital from its latest round to “fast-track its go-to-market strategy,” as well as invest in product development initiatives.

“We have been very efficient with capital so far and we could continue to grow the business using the same sound financial fundamentals,” Privacera Chief Executive Balaji Ganesan wrote in a blog post today. “However, we realize no one has a crystal ball into the future and we cannot control external events. This funding round gives us the freedom to focus on building a long-lasting company and ensure we continue to build the best-in-class product offering.”

Image: Privacera