Concentric helps companies keep track of their sensitive data

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.

Krishnan explained how the tech works.

First, a customer links Concentric to its databases, data stores, email and messaging apps, and even generative AI chatbots such as Microsoft Copilot. Then Concentric uses AI to find sensitive data like passwords, private files, and audio and video recordings of meetings in those linked places.

Concentric then gives the customer recommendations on ways to better secure its data and adhere to compliance standards. It can also trace lineage, showing where a certain piece of data came from and how it’s being used.

“Operationalizing data security is a huge challenge,” Krishnan said. “With Concentric, customers can identify anomalous activity and remediate those issues to prevent data loss.”

But doesn’t monitoring all this company data present a huge security risk? What if Concentric gets hacked, or what if hackers try to intercept the data flowing between apps and Concentric’s platform?

Krishnan told me that Concentric doesn’t deal with raw data; instead, it creates semantic representations of the data and data categories. “Concentric AI products do not store sensitive user data,” he said.

Concentric isn’t alone in the data protection market, which could be worth over $500 billion by 2032, according to one estimate. The startup competes with Varonis, BigID, Netwrix, Spirion, Cyera, and Securiti, among other vendors.

Still, Krishnan said that Concentric’s client base is growing at a healthy clip: It has grown by 300% from a year earlier.

The continued burgeoning of the data organizations have to wrangle is no doubt contributing to the boom. In a Matillion poll, data professionals said that their company’s data volumes are growing by 63% per month on average.

“There’s an unprecedented demand for data security posture management globally,” Krishnan said.

San Mateo-based Concentric recently closed a $45 million Series B round co-led by Top Tier Capital Partners and HarbourVest, with participation from CyberFuture, Ballistic Ventures, Citi Ventures, Engineering Capital and Clear Ventures. The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $67 million, and the fresh cash will be used to expand Concentric’s partner program and product portfolio as well as increase the company’s headcount to 125 people by 2025.