Data security startup Immuta Inc. has raised $90 million from a large group of investors that included the venture capital arms of Dell Technologies Inc. and Intel Corp., it was announced today.

Immuta provides a software platform that helps companies prevent unauthorized access to their data. Traditionally, data access rules have often had to be implemented separately for each system in which an enterprise keeps information.

That makes it difficult to enforce cybersecurity policies consistently. Immuta says its platform overcomes the challenge by allowing administrators to manage data from a single, centralized hub.

“It all comes down to scalability,” Immuta co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Steve Touw (pictured) said in a December interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE (below). “For the same reasons you separate storage from compute … you want to separate your policy from your platform.”

Another challenge Immutable aims to ease, which also stems from the fact that companies’ information is often spread across many different systems, is data discovery. Sensitive information such as credit card numbers can require more stringent access rules than other records.

But before those extra rules can be applied, administrators must first locate the sensitive information. Immuta automatically finds items such as credit card numbers to free up time and tags them to make them easier to organize in the future. 

Administrators manage what access restrictions are enforced and how via no-code interface. According to Immuta, users can define data rules in fairly simple, nature-language sentences that its platform’s algorithms then implement across a company’s systems. The platform can adapt how it enforces the rules if needed, for example when the number of employees who need to view a certain dataset grows.

“Just setting your policies on your data once upfront, that’s not the end of the story,” Touw explained. “The analyst will start creating their own data products. And they want to share that with other analysts, and so when you think about this, this becomes a very complex problem of …. [ensuring] that only the right people are seeing the things that they’re allowed to see, but still enabling analytics.”

Immuta says its software is used by companies such as Atlassian Corp. Plc and Credit Suisse Group AG. The startup claims that bookings jumped 115% in the last fiscal year while its headcount doubled, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers.

Immuta will use the new funding to grow its research and development, sales and marketing operations. A portion of the capital has also allocated to expanding strategic partnerships with other technology companies. Just this morning, in conjunction with the funding news, Immuta introduced new integrations for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Amazon Redshift data warehouse and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Synapse analytics service.

Immuta has raised about $160 million in funding to date.

Photo: SiliconANGLE