By Yoav Regev, CEO and Co-Founder, Sentra
Today we’re announcing that Sentra has raised a $30 million dollar Series A round to revolutionize the way cloud first enterprises secure their data. This brings Sentra’s total funding to $53M. I’m excited to be working together with Standard Industries, Munich Re Ventures, Moore Capital, Xerox, INT3, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Zeev Ventures to help enterprises securely leverage their data to enable growth. The last 18 months have already been an amazing journey, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share some thoughts around how we got to where we are, and what I’m looking forward to in the coming months and years.
The Sentra Team
When we founded Sentra, we had a very clear objective regarding the team we wanted to build - we only wanted the best people. People who are passionate about their work and the problems we’re addressing. Not just people who are technically brilliant, but those who are drawn to challenges and aren’t easily discouraged. This is the mindset required to solve one of the largest problems facing cybersecurity leaders.
18 months later, it’s clear we accomplished that objective. This team built a revolutionary new data security platform that’s impressing security leaders on a daily basis. Within minutes of seeing the platform, security leaders grasp the value Sentra is providing - securing the most important corporate asset (data) while simultaneously breaking down silos between security, engineering, and data teams.
The Sentra Way
Culture comes from people. When you have the best people it’s just going to be easier to build a productive and healthy culture. Teams should be excited to work together. I’d describe the culture today as one that values independence, responsibility, and persistence. Team members need to be given the freedom to try new things, occasionally fail at them, and move on quickly to find other, better ways forward. When you’re building a product to solve a global security problem, it’s going to be difficult, and there will be setbacks and disappointments. The team at Sentra embodies these values and it’s what’s allowed us to build such a revolutionary product so quickly.
Building the Data Centric Future
Getting the right team and culture in place is critical for tackling one of the greatest security challenges of our time - data security in the cloud. There are a few reasons why cloud data security is an unsolved problem.
It begins with the simple fact that data travels in the cloud. It gets processed, extracted, duplicated, and moved by different teams. But when data moves, its security posture doesn’t move with it - for example, if it was encrypted in one environment and duplicated to a lower environment, it might be unencrypted now. Another issue caused by data movement is that sensitive data gets abandoned and forgotten, creating vulnerable shadow data. Finally, even when vulnerable sensitive data is identified, it’s hard to know where the data came from and how it’s meant to be secured.
Data and engineering teams are the ones moving this data around. And that’s actually a good thing. We want them to leverage the flexibility of the cloud to do amazing things for the business. Security should enable this work, not slow it down. At the same time, we need to make sure the data is secured. This is what we’re building. A data-centric future where we keep the data secure and enable the business to reach new heights.
Here’s what this future is going to look like:
First, companies will know where all of their sensitive data is. Shadow data, especially sensitive shadow data, will not exist. Data is the most important asset, and knowing where your most important asset is at all times is crucial.
Next, sensitive data will always have the right security posture. When sensitive data moves and its security posture is affected, the right people know instantly. And they also know where the data came from, who owns it, and how to remediate data vulnerabilities before they become incidents. The data attack surface will shrink, with the result that even when there’s a breach, the most sensitive data assets are secured.
The result? Business growth. Enterprises will be able to confidently move large amounts of data between cloud environments, generating the insights and innovations they need to grow. In other words, the full promise of the cloud will be realized.
In the future, organizations will be able to move quickly and securely at the same time!
We’re building this future right now.
