Concentric AI raises USD $45m to drive data security

Concentric AI has secured USD $45 million in a Series B financing round, marking a significant milestone for the company in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) market.

The funding round was led by Top Tier Capital Partners and HarbourVest Partners, with participation from the Global CISO Investment Alliance, CyberFuture. Existing investors, including Ballistic Ventures, Engineering Capital, Clear Ventures, and Citi Ventures, also contributed to this round. This investment brings Concentric AI's total funding to more than USD $67 million.

Garth Timoll Sr., General Partner of Top Tier Capital Partners, will join Concentric AI's Board of Directors as part of this transaction. Timoll stated, "Concentric AI is transforming the way organizations of all sizes protect their mission-critical and private data. Top Tier Capital Partners looks to invest in innovative companies with great growth potential. We believe Concentric AI's leading DSPM solution leveraging AI and natural language processing certainly meets that criteria."

Barmak Meftah, Co-founder and General Partner at Ballistic, expressed confidence in Concentric AI's position in the market: "Before leading the Series A round for Concentric AI, we looked at almost all vendors in the broader DSPM space. The area of data classification, data access governance and especially the new use cases of sensitive data going into AI systems represents a market that is rapidly growing, and strength and depth of technology matters. Concentric AI, by far, has the best AI-driven product, and we always knew the product and the team, led by Karthik Krishnan, are the best in the market. We are elated to welcome our good friends at Top Tier Capital Partners and HarbourVest Partners to join us in this great journey as we are experiencing incredible growth and market traction."

The firm has realised substantial growth, tripling its customer base and experiencing a 300% year-over-year increase. The demand for intelligent data security governance has been driven by the rising prevalence of generative AI solutions such as Microsoft Copilot, which are changing how data is interacted with across enterprise environments. Jesse Whaley, CISO and investor at CyberFuture, commented, "We thoroughly examined the competitive field of DSPM solutions and found that Concentric AI stands out because of the breadth and depth of their capabilities and the fact that they can cover both on-prem datacenter and cloud environments."

Jason Frame, CIO of Southern Nevada Health District, shared his positive experience with the company's offerings: "Concentric AI is helping us manage our sensitive data across diverse environments. We have now moved on from manual, error-prone processes to a robust, AI-driven data governance system. With Concentric AI, we've strengthened our data security and have aligned our operations with the compliance standards required of our organization."

Karthik Krishnan, Founder and CEO of Concentric AI, welcomed the new partners and board member, saying, "We are thrilled to welcome Top Tier Capital Partners, HarbourVest Partners and CyberFuture to the Concentric AI family, and Garth Timoll Sr. to the board. Operationalizing data security remains a huge challenge for enterprises and Concentric AI has now demonstrated across diverse verticals and companies of all sizes that its Semantic Intelligence solution helps enterprises easily discover, monitor and protect their most sensitive business critical data. This round allows us to significantly accelerate our go-to-market and engineering capabilities to meet the growing and pressing needs in the marketplace for AI-driven data security solutions to help address enterprises' security and compliance requirements."

The Data Security Governance market, which includes DSPM and Data Access Governance (DAG), is expected to grow significantly, surpassing USD $8 billion by 2027, driven by increasing data breaches, regulatory requirements, cloud migration, and heightened data privacy awareness.