LightBeam Raises $17.8 Million in New Capital Driven by Explosive Demand for its AI-powered Data Protection Solutions

Funding accelerates convergence of disparate point products, enabling organizations to protect against data security threats while efficiently meeting privacy and AI governance obligations with a unified platform

LightBeam.ai, the zero trust data protection pioneer converging data security, privacy, and AI governance, has announced that it has raised $17.8M in an oversubscribed Series A round funding. The new infusion of capital will enable LightBeam to expand its go-to-market initiatives across sales, marketing, channel, and alliances, and to continue investing in its vision of converging data security, privacy, and AI governance into a single platform. The round is led by Vertex Ventures US, and supported by Dropbox Ventures along with existing investors 8VC and Village Global, alongside several angel investors.

This investment comes on the heels of strong business momentum, with nearly 300% annual customer base growth led by banking, financial services, insurance, healthcare, tech, and retail sectors.

“In the era of Generative AI breakthroughs, organizations are empowered to unlock valuable insights from customer data. However, this advancement poses the crucial challenge of ensuring secure and compliant handling of customer data within the evolving landscape of AI governance and privacy regulations,” said Himanshu Shukla, co-founder and CEO of LightBeam. “At LightBeam, we address these challenges head-on with our revolutionary Zero Trust sensitive data protection platform. What sets us apart is our capability to automate security and compliance workflows seamlessly, providing a frictionless experience for sensitive data governance. We are committed to providing organizations with the tools they need to navigate these challenges effortlessly, empowering them to responsibly harness the power of Generative AI.”

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Today’s data economy necessitates employees have access to a wide variety of company and users’ data to improve their decision making, creating massive data exposure challenges. Similarly, modern AI solutions often use company and user data to train themselves, further exacerbating privacy and data security concerns. A zero trust approach to data encapsulates a unified and consistent approach to data inventory, classification, and access – helping organizations maintain complete provenance of their data.

“LightBeam automates data-privacy and data-security workflows unified by a core engine that accurately and completely scans, identifies, and classifies files, documents and databases,” said Sandeep Bhadra, General Partner, Vertex Ventures US. “This team has drawn on their experience working together at Nutanix and combined it with the latest innovations in deep-learning to deliver an industry-leading product.”

Customers across multiple industry sectors are already benefiting from LightBeam’s unique approach to data protection and governance, and are excited about what this investment will mean for the growth of the company, and the expansion and further enhancement of LightBeam’s solutions.

“At ESL Federal Credit Union, we are proud to be trustees of our members’ data,” said Matt Davis, CISSP, VP and Chief Information Security Officer at ESL Federal Credit Union. “LightBeam’s unique technology enables us to ensure that sensitive data is identified and cataloged wherever it is, and helps us put the necessary controls in place across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS applications. We are delighted with the ease of use and accuracy of the solution.”

“LightBeam has been an excellent partner helping us grow our privacy practice at Guild by providing a central platform to manage and optimize privacy objectives,” said Caroline Prieto, Senior Director of Privacy and Privacy Counsel at Guild. “This work has supported the scale of our business and helped accelerate the impact of our mission to create opportunity across the workforce.”

Over the past year, LightBeam has been the proud recipient of numerous accolades, including:

• 2023 CRN Stellar Startup – Security
• InfoWorld 2023 Technology of the Year Award finalist
• RegTech Insight USA Awards 2023 ‘Best Data Privacy Solution’
• Silver Globee Golden Bridge Award for Best Security Solution for Large Enterprise Innovation
• Gold Globee® Business Award for privacy and security solution

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Supporting quotes

“At 8VC, we made an early bet on helping create a future-facing AI-powered stack focused to solve present and emerging challenges in data security, privacy, and AI governance, with a focus on working seamlessly across structured and unstructured data which are exploding in the enterprise,” said Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner at 8VC. “Our continued investment is a testament to our belief in the transformative power of LightBeam’s mission, and we couldn’t be more proud to continue supporting the team.”

“The combination of LightBeam’s integrated platform, their AI-powered data discovery tools, and their ability to ingest and classify both structured and unstructured data, uniquely positions them to be a leader in the data governance space,” said Donald Tucker, Head of Corporate Development and Ventures at Dropbox. “Trust and privacy are core to everything we do at Dropbox, and Dropbox Ventures is thrilled to partner with the LightBeam team to help accelerate their mission of helping customers understand and securely manage their data footprints.”

“Digital transformation has eroded traditional network boundaries, making data the new perimeter; but you can’t protect what you can’t see. Remote workforce and hybrid cloud infrastructure have created data sprawl across organizations, and cybersecurity teams find it increasingly challenging to identify and track sensitive data across their environments,” said Adam Sicker, Sr. Director, Solutions Architecture at Defy Security. “LightBeam’s cutting edge AI helps our clients light up sensitive data, regardless of where it exists, providing them the visibility they need to effectively mitigate attacks and comply with privacy regulations. We are delighted to partner with LightBeam to help create digital trust for our clients and their customers.”

“A plethora of point solutions in data security and privacy areas are actually making the sensitive data security problem worse than before. AI governance is falling through the cracks amongst the data, security, and privacy teams,” said Priyadarshi Prasad, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of LightBeam. “We created the LightBeam unified zero-trust data protection platform to help customers implement consistent risk controls on their sensitive data assets across their cloud, on-prem, and SaaS solutions. With no data or metadata leaving their networks, customers from sensitive industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare can confidently leverage LightBeam to catalog, control, and comply with numerous regulations.”

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