Concentric helps companies keep track of their sensitive data
Concentric AI, a startup developing a data cataloging solution for enterprises, has closed a new funding round.
Enterprises have a data inventory problem. The amount of data they’re collecting and storing is increasing, and that data is being spread across disparate storage buckets. Yet many organizations rely on processes that essentially amount to pencil-and-paper methods for tracking data provenance. According to one survey, more than 50% of companies use Excel spreadsheets in their data privacy and compliance efforts.
Karthik Krishnan, Shankar Subramaniam, and Madhu Shashanka thought they might have the engineering chops to build something to make this easier for companies. The trio had cut their teeth in cybersecurity: Years ago, Subramaniam and Shashanka had recruited Krishnan as one of the first employees at their behavioral analytics startup, Niara.
A few years after Hewlett Packard acquired Niara, the trio began sketching out ideas for an enterprise data management tool. They envisioned a product that could catalog a company’s critical data — including information stored in infrequently accessed places — and automatically flag any data that’s at risk of compromise.
“We hoped to solve one of the most pressing data security challenges facing the modern enterprise,” Krishnan told TechCrunch. “That is: identifying and securing business-critical information within structured and unstructured data, stored on-premises or in the cloud, at scale.”
The trio built an MVP and founded Concentric AI to further develop and commercialize it. Today, Concentric has customers in industrial manufacturing, insurance, and higher education, including car insurance carrier Hagerty and DeVry University.
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