09 March 2021

Why Cervin Ventures Invested in Privacera

Privacera announced a new round of funding, bringing total investments to over $65 million. Cervin was among the first institutional investors.

Privacera, an industry-leading cloud access and data governance platform, recently announced that they have raised a new round of funding, bringing the total investment in the company to over $65 million. So why are investors excited about this company?

 

Early Investment in a Talented Team

 

In 2019, we were the first institutional investors in the company and have continued to invest in subsequent rounds, including the most recent financing. When we first met Balaji Ganesan and Don Bosco Durai, the founders at Privacera, we instantly connected with their vision. Enterprises are undergoing digital transformation to accelerate the speed and agility with which they can make business decisions. They are increasingly making data-driven decisions. To enable these decisions to be made collaboratively by geographically dispersed teams, critical business data must reside in the public cloud. Often this data is the most sensitive and private data of the Enterprise or their customers, and Enterprises needed a solution to protect this data from bad actors. To reduce information leakage risk from digital transformation, Enterprises were looking for a proven data governance and access control solution and that is exactly what Privacera provides. 

 

The founders and team at Privacera were the main contributors to the development of Apache Ranger, the leading data governance solution for Hadoop. Apache Ranger is widely deployed and trusted by Enterprises today, managing petabytes of data around the world. As data platforms proliferated and moved to the public cloud, Balaji and Bosco recognized the need for data governance across multiple cloud services and analytics platforms. They founded Privacera and built a cutting-edge solution that spans across various data analytics platforms and based it on the established Apache Ranger framework.

 

Privacera in the World of Data-Driven Decision Making


Historically, Enterprises made decisions based on instinct and past experiences. However, modern businesses both store and generate a large amount of data, so they can now make business decisions based on analyzing this data. As Enterprises increase their use of data to make decisions, they are using different data platforms depending on the kind of decisions they are making - for example, Apache Spark from Databricks, Starburst’s Presto, AWS EMR, or Snowflake - just to name a few. But all Enterprises want a single unified framework for privacy control and data governance across these different platforms in use. Privacera provides precisely this capability making it the premier solution for their customers’ data governance needs.

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Opportunities for Growth in an Evolving Market

Given that more and more Enterprises are moving to the public cloud and the amount of sensitive data in the cloud is exploding, the Privacera solution addresses a rapidly expanding market.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that digital transformation is not a choice but rather a business imperative; this is causing Enterprises across the board, including the most conservative companies to migrate their IT infrastructure to the public cloud. Even after the pandemic is behind us, a significant number of knowledge workers will continue to work remotely. This greatly accelerates and expands the market for Privacera as cloud migration carries information leakage risk if data is not properly governed and secured. We expect Privacera to remain a leader in this market as datastores and analytical workloads are migrated to the cloud. 

Others have similar expectations as Privacera was recently ranked as #2 in the “Early Stage” category in Wing Ventures Tech 30. This is a testament to their foresight, architecture, and execution as one of the elite set of companies with  “most potential to tectonically shift how enterprises operate for the better and change how business is done.” 

At Cervin Ventures, we invest in data analytics, infrastructure, vertical Saas applications, and software delivered as SaaS. Privacera is at the center of all these markets. Balaji Ganesan and Don Bosco Durai have built a highly efficient machine and are on a significant growth trajectory. We are indeed fortunate to have been the first institutional investor in the company and continue to be excited about its prospects.