data-security
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Abhi Sharma
For Abhi Sharma, the useful map is never the static one. From a college navigation experiment to Relyance AI's moving graph of enterprise data, his career has followed one question: can software reveal what people cannot see?
The Compliance Tax Nobody Reads on the Invoice
Regulated industries buy contact center software differently. A fintech or lender is not comparing feature checklists, it is asking where customer data lives and who is liable when something goes wrong. This story examines the 'compliance tax' that financial services companies pay for cloud contact centers, and how UJET's CRM-first architecture answers it differently than Talkdesk or Five9 by keeping customer data and PII inside the system that already owns it. Capital on Tap, a UK-and-US business credit provider serving 200,000 small businesses, is the published example: after cycling through three CX vendors in two years, it lifted SLA attainment to 92% on UJET.
Candor
Candor (YC W25) is a San Francisco cybersecurity startup building agentic data loss prevention and insider risk management. Instead of drowning security teams in false positives like legacy DLP tools, Candor's AI agents watch both the data movement and the person behind it - stitching together the story of who is about to leak source code, exfiltrate IP, or misuse AI tools - so lean teams know exactly who to watch before damage is done.
Tarique Mustafa
Tarique Mustafa is a Silicon Valley cybersecurity founder, engineer and AI researcher who serves as CEO, CTO and founder of Chorology, Inc., a San Jose company applying deep AI to automate data discovery, classification, mapping and compliance enforcement for enterprises. A serial entrepreneur with two prior startups that ended in acquisitions, he previously founded GhangorCloud, a pioneer of fourth-generation data leak prevention, and held senior roles at Symantec, MCI WorldCom and others. He holds dual master's degrees and did PhD research in AI at USC, and holds multiple patents in deep AI.
Evervault
Evervault is a developer-first encryption platform that lets companies collect, store, process and forward highly sensitive data - especially payment card data - without ever handling it in plaintext. Founded in 2019 by Irish entrepreneur Shane Curran, the New York and Dublin based company pairs a dual-custody encryption model with products for card payments, secure enclaves and network proxying. It processes over $5 billion in transaction volume and generates more than 100 million encrypted tokens per month for customers including Ramp, Rippling and CarTrawler.
ORION Security
ORION Security is an AI-native data loss prevention (DLP) company that protects enterprises from data leaks without relying on manually written policies. Founded in 2024 by Nitay Milner and Jonathan Kreiner, ORION uses large language models and specialized AI agents to map how data normally flows across SaaS, email, cloud, endpoints, and AI tools, then analyzes content sensitivity, user identity, behavioral intent, and data lineage to catch exfiltration and insider threats in real time. The platform targets the three core sources of data loss - human error, malicious insiders, and external attackers - while cutting the false positives and maintenance burden that plague legacy DLP.
Veza
Veza is an identity security company that helps enterprises understand and control who can take what action on what data. Its patented Access Graph maps permissions across cloud platforms, SaaS apps, data systems, and infrastructure for human, machine, and AI identities, letting organizations enforce least privilege, automate access reviews, and govern non-human and AI-agent identities. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in the California Bay Area, Veza agreed to be acquired by ServiceNow in a deal announced December 2025.
Zscaler
Zscaler is a cloud-native cybersecurity company that pioneered the zero trust security model for enterprises. Its Zero Trust Exchange platform connects users, devices, and applications directly and securely over the internet - inspecting traffic in the cloud rather than backhauling it through legacy hardware appliances. Founded in 2007 and publicly traded on NASDAQ as ZS, Zscaler processes hundreds of billions of transactions daily for thousands of large organizations, and has expanded into AI-driven security operations, data protection, and digital experience monitoring.
Cyberhaven
Cyberhaven is a data security company that protects enterprises from data exfiltration and insider risk by tracing how information moves rather than just where it sits. Founded in 2016 by five PhD researchers with roots in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, the company built a proprietary 'data lineage' engine and an AI layer, Linea AI, that combines Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Insider Risk Management, and AI security into one platform. Reaching a $1 billion valuation in April 2025 after a $100M Series D, Cyberhaven serves customers such as Snowflake, Motorola, Reddit, and major law firms.
Atolio
Atolio is a private, AI-powered enterprise search platform that runs inside a company's own cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) or on-premises. It connects to workplace systems like Slack, Google Workspace, Office 365, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, then indexes them with document-level permissions so employees only see what they are already authorized to view. Founded in 2019 by Splunk and PagerDuty veterans, Atolio pairs hybrid semantic-plus-keyword search with permission-aware retrieval-augmented generation, giving enterprises secure question answering across siloed knowledge without their data ever leaving their environment.
Baffle, Inc.
Baffle, Inc. is a Santa Clara data security company that builds a no-code data protection platform - combining encryption, tokenization and masking - so enterprises can protect sensitive data across databases, cloud data warehouses and GenAI pipelines without rewriting application code.
Basis Theory
Basis Theory is a payments infrastructure company that gives merchants a cloud-native, PCI Level 1-compliant vault to tokenize, route, and control sensitive payment data across any payment service provider - without vendor lock-in. Founded in 2020 by fintech veterans from Dwolla, Yodlee, and Klarna, the company has raised roughly $50 million and now positions its vault as the foundation for AI-driven, agentic commerce.
Bedrock Data
Bedrock Data is a Menlo Park, California data security company that builds an AI-native data security posture management (DSPM) platform. Its Metadata Lake technology discovers, classifies and tracks sensitive data across cloud, SaaS and AI systems at petabyte scale, giving enterprises visibility into what data they have, who can access it and how it moves - without copying that data out of a customer's environment.
Chorology, Inc.
Chorology, Inc. is a San Jose-based data security and compliance startup that uses a Deep-AI 'knowledge encoding' engine - rather than conventional machine learning - to automatically discover, classify, and map an enterprise's sensitive data across structured and unstructured repositories. Its flagship platform, CAPE (Compliance and Posture Enforcer), aims to give organizations a continuous, mandate-agnostic view of where regulated data lives so they can enforce data security posture and meet frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Founded by serial cybersecurity entrepreneur Tarique Mustafa, the company emerged from stealth in July 2024 with $9M in funding and a roster of early Fortune 500 users.
Keepsafe
Keepsafe is a San Francisco privacy-software company that builds simple consumer apps for locking down personal data on phones. Its flagship Photo Vault - an encrypted locker for private photos and videos - grew to more than 75 million users, and the company has since expanded into a suite that includes App Lock, a private Browser with built-in VPN, and Unlisted burner phone numbers. Founded in 2012 by Zouhair Belkoura and Philipp Berner, Keepsafe's premise is that digital privacy should be as easy as closing a drawer.
Lightbeam
Lightbeam is a San Jose-based data security and privacy company that converges DSPM, privacy operations, and AI governance into one identity-centric platform. Founded in 2020 by ex-Nutanix engineers, it uses AI to discover, classify, and map sensitive data across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments, tying each data fragment back to the human it belongs to. Customers in banking, healthcare, insurance, and tech use Lightbeam to automate compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI while cutting data risk and controlling AI exposure through tools like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Google Gemini.
Relyance AI
Relyance AI is a San Francisco-based enterprise software company that maps how data actually moves through an organization - from source code and cloud infrastructure to third-party apps and AI models - and continuously checks that movement against customer contracts, privacy regulations, and compliance frameworks. Founded in 2020 by Abhi Sharma and Leila Golchehreh, the company sells an AI-native data governance and security platform used by companies including Coinbase, Snowflake, Notion, Plaid, and Canva. It raised a $32M Series B in October 2024 led by Thomvest Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $62-67M.
Theom
Theom is a San Jose-based data security company building what it calls an AI-native Data Operations Center - a platform that discovers, classifies, tracks and protects enterprise data across cloud data lakes, warehouses, SaaS and generative-AI environments. Rather than guarding infrastructure or access alone, Theom takes a data-first approach: it maps who can touch which data, scores the financial value and risk of that data, detects breach behavior mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and enforces policy in real time. Founded in December 2020 by former Cisco/Tetration and Google engineers, it raised a $20M Series A in May 2025 led by Wing VC with strategic backers Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures and SentinelOne's S Ventures, and counts Fiserv, Grammarly, Tradeweb and JetBlue among its customers.
Tonic.ai
Tonic.ai builds synthetic data infrastructure that lets engineering and AI teams work with realistic, privacy-safe stand-ins for production data. Its platform de-identifies, masks, subsets, and synthesizes both structured databases and unstructured text so developers can test software, train models, and feed LLM and RAG pipelines without exposing sensitive information. Founded in 2018 by a team out of Palantir and Tableau, the San Francisco company serves enterprises across finance, healthcare, and technology and has raised roughly $56M in venture funding.
Nitay Milner
Nitay Milner is co-founder and CEO of ORION Security, a New York and Tel Aviv-based startup rebuilding data loss prevention around AI that learns how data actually moves inside a company. He raised a $32M Series A led by Norwest in February 2026, with IBM participating, less than a year after a $6M seed. Before ORION he was a senior product leader at Epsagon (acquired by Cisco for around $500M) and previously co-founded DatsMi, an event-media startup.
James Pham
James Pham is the co-founder and CEO of Opsin, a San Francisco-area startup securing how enterprises adopt generative AI. After validating the problem through more than 300 conversations with industry leaders, he built Opsin to detect and remediate data oversharing in tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, and has since expanded it into a full enterprise agent security platform. An immigrant from Vietnam with an MIT MBA and a machine-learning product background from Abnormal Security, Pham now leads a company in production at regulated healthcare, manufacturing, and financial-services organizations.
Seclore
Seclore is a data-centric security company that protects sensitive files and emails wherever they travel - across any user, device, app, or cloud. Its browser-based ARMOR platform unifies Data Security Posture Management, AI-powered Data Loss Prevention, data classification, and Enterprise Digital Rights Management so organizations keep persistent, granular control over data even after it leaves their walls. Founded in India in 2008 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Seclore serves more than 2,000 enterprises and government bodies across roughly 29 countries.
ATAD Corp.
ATAD Corp. is a Seoul-based technology company building an AI-driven multi-cloud operating platform that helps teams run AWS, Azure, and GCP environments from one place. Its flagship product, ODiiN, uses AI to forecast and self-heal infrastructure problems, claiming up to 80% cost savings and large productivity gains. Founded in 2023 by cloud and cybersecurity specialists, ATAD pairs cloud automation with a security stack built on AI, multi-factor authentication, and zero-knowledge proofs, and also runs Heiimdahl (a multi-LLM monitoring gateway) and Kraton (a blockchain-based decentralized VPN). The company has raised about $3.36M and holds a growing portfolio of patents in multi-cloud integration and secure data distribution.
Elizabeth Nammour
Elizabeth Nammour is the co-founder and CEO of Teleskope, a New York-based data security company she launched in 2022 after wrestling with petabyte-scale data sprawl as a security engineer at Airbnb. Teleskope bills itself as the industry's first agentic data security platform, autonomously scanning, classifying, and remediating sensitive data so organizations can adopt AI without losing track of their information. In late 2025 the company raised a $25 million Series A led by M13, bringing total funding to $32.2 million, on the back of 600% year-over-year growth and an 85% pilot-to-paid conversion rate.
TBCASoft
TBCASoft is a Silicon Valley blockchain company building a consortium-based distributed ledger that lets telecom carriers, mobile payment apps and banks interoperate across borders. Its HIVEX payment network lets travelers pay with their home QR-code wallet abroad without merchants changing POS systems, while the CBSG Consortium and CCIS identity framework extend the same trust rails to digital identity and authentication. Founded in 2016 by Ling Wu, it is backed by SoftBank and Naver and connects payment apps reaching tens of millions of users across Asia.
Teleskope
Teleskope is a New York-based data security company that builds what it calls the industry's first agentic data protection platform. Founded in 2022 by former Airbnb security engineers Elizabeth Nammour and Julie Trias, it autonomously discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive data across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments, then automatically remediates risk through redaction, masking, encryption, and access fixes. The platform uses smaller, fine-tuned models to read business context, aiming to move teams beyond alert fatigue toward real action.
VIA
VIA (VIA Science, Inc.) is a Somerville, Massachusetts Web3 company building a decentralized, quantum-resistant, passwordless platform that lets governments and enterprises share and analyze sensitive data without exposing it. Backed by 18 issued patents, VIA is the first blockchain application to earn U.S. Department of Defense-wide cybersecurity accreditation, and its tools protect data and identities for the DoD, Fortune 100 firms, and energy utilities worldwide.
Embark Corporation
Embark Corporation is a New York-based education technology company that has built online application and admissions software since 1995. Its flagship platform, Embark Campus, runs the full admissions lifecycle - recruiting, applications, review, decisions, enrollment and data integration - for colleges, universities, fellowships and scholarship programs. Embark says its software has powered more than 16 million student applications for institutions including Harvard, NYU, Stanford and the Rhodes and Fulbright fellowships.
Cohesity
Cohesity is a Santa Clara-based data security and management company that helps enterprises back up, protect, secure, and recover their data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. Founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, it built a hyperscale platform to consolidate fragmented secondary data, and after merging with Veritas' enterprise data protection business in December 2024 it became the world's largest data protection software provider, serving roughly 13,000 organizations including most of the Fortune 500.
Rubrik
Rubrik is a Palo Alto-based cyber resilience company that helps organizations protect, recover, and secure their data across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments. Built on Zero Trust principles, its Rubrik Security Cloud platform combines immutable backups, ransomware detection, and rapid recovery so businesses can keep running through a cyberattack. Founded in 2014 and public on the NYSE since 2024, Rubrik crossed $1 billion in subscription ARR and is pushing into AI-era data security.