Data security startup Immuta Inc. today said it has raised a $100 million late-stage funding round that pegs the company’s valuation at $1 billion.

The maker of software that secures access at the data level said the Series E round brings the total amount it has raised to $267 million.

Immuta’s software prevents unauthorized access to data across an organization’s entire computing landscape, providing an alternative to traditional approaches that secure data separately in each system. In contrast, Immuta says, its platform allows administrators to manage data from a central hub. The system also discovers and classifies data using pattern recognition algorithms.

In most corporate environments, “people have a platform that proxies to your compute layers like Redshift or Snowflake,” said Chief Executive Matt Carroll (pictured), referring to the popular data warehousing platforms from Amazon Web Services Inc. and Snowflake Inc. “We’ve taken a completely different approach. We wrote code natively to embed into each compute layer [of source data] so your governance team can author policies and enforce them natively on the data but the customers never see it.”

Policy reduction

Immuta’s engine scans an organization’s data and infers use based on its characteristics. It then creates tags that can be used as a foundation for global policies. “We use access-based controls based on attributes at query time,” he said. “That means we can discover data and apply policies in 90% of use cases.”

Carroll said customers typically can cut the number of data access policies they enforce by 75% and that one customer was able to reduce a 400-page policy manual to just 56 rules. He noted that the company’s platform is not a data discovery engine but rather focuses on data classification and integrates with systems that automate data discovery.

Using traditional role-based access controls, “you’d have to write exceptions so that only a person from Massachusetts can see data from Massachusetts,” Carroll said. “If we know where the user is we only need to write the policy once. We don’t have to write ‘not’ statements. Simplifying at scale requires much less policy overhead.”

Having raised $90 million less than a year ago, Immuta clearly doesn’t need the money to fund operations. Rather, he said, “We want to get aggressive with mergers and acquisitions as well as internal investment. We’re going to have nearly $200 million on hand for organic and inorganic investment.” Among the areas the company is looking to fund are monitoring tools and expansion of its international footprint.

Immuta counts Roche Holding AG, Mercedes-Benz Group AG, International Consolidated Airlines Group SA and the U.S. Army among its customers. Carroll said the company doubled its customer base last year and grew revenue by more than 130%.

This round was led by NightDragon Acquisition Corp., whose managing director, Dave DeWalt, was formerly CEO of security vendors FireEye Inc. and McAfee LLC. Another new investor in this round is Snowflake Ventures, the data warehousing vendors” investment arm.

Previous investors who participated in this round include Dell Technologies Capital, DFJ Growth Management LLC, IAG Ventures Pty Ltd., Intel Capital Corp., March Capital Management LLC, StepStone Group Inc., Ten Eleven Ventures LLC, and Wipro Ventures, which is the venture capital arm of Wipro Ltd.

Photo: SiliconANGLE