Dathena raises $12 million for AI that monitors and classifies sensitive enterprise data

Dathena, a startup employing AI and machine learning to identify and protect sensitive enterprise data, today announced that it secured $12 million in equity financing. The fresh capital follows the opening of the company’s U.S. headquarters in New York City, and CEO Christopher Muffat says the funding will support Dathena’s R&D efforts and the hiring of stateside staff across sales, marking, and customer success teams.

Dathena’s platform is designed to help companies protect against breaches while remaining in compliance with GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other such regulations. About 37% of businesses operating in the EU say they’ve had to hire at least six new employees to achieve GDPR compliance (according to Netsparker), and among those that have experienced a data breach, the average cost amounted to $3.6 million or $141 for each record lost (according to the Ponemon Institute).

Five products form Dathena’s suite: Discovery, Privacy, Classify, Protect, and Detect.

Discovery and Privacy reveal what kind of files are stored throughout an organization, where they’re located, and who has access to them at any one time. In addition, they identify business-critical data, sort by toxicity and risk, and eliminate duplicates while mapping all personally identifiable data into a comprehensive backend library.

Classify filters data by business category and level of confidentiality, automatically labeling sensitive information and delivering visualizations of files to managers and administrators. It learns organizations’ documentation patterns for data in motion and at rest, achieving 80% accuracy out of the box and up to 99% after deployment, Dathena claims.

As for Protect and Detect, they ensure classification tags and keywords export to third-party information security systems and shed light on who, how, when, and where employees are creating and accessing data. Detect provides continuous monitoring and spotlighting of data access and storage anomalies, for its part, as well as smart alerts and integrated workflows for IT team remediation.

Dathena competes with well-funded startups like OneTrust and Bitglass in the $120 billion data protection market, but it claims to have over 200,000 users and “a multitude” of enterprise clients. Muffat expects to see an uptick in inquiries in the coming months as remote work motivated by the pandemic gives rise to data protection challenges.

Jungle Ventures led this latest funding round (a series A), with participation from Caphorn and Enterprise Singapore’s SEEDS Capital and existing investors Cerracap Ventures and MS&AD Ventures. It follows a previously undisclosed seed round in November 2018.

Muffat, who worked with HSBC as a lead investigator and headed information risk management at Barclays, founded Dathena in 2016. More than 100 employees work out of its headquarters in Singapore and offices in Geneva.