San Francisco-based Symmetry Systems closed a $15 million Series A as it looks to push companies to move beyond network and application security and into protecting its most valuable asset — its data.
The round was co-led by Prefix Capital and ForgePoint Capital with participation from Accenture Ventures. Founded in 2019, the cybersecurity company has now raised $18 million.
While many companies look at protecting their data as it is used in the network or in application flow, Symmetry’s solution — DataGuard — helps companies protect data earlier in the process as it sits in databases or data lakes, said co-founder and CEO Mohit Tiwari. In addition, the platform gives companies greater visibility into their data and compliance issues that cloud security tools cannot, he added.
The company decided to raise a Series A after seeing significant customer interest last year — conducting more than 100 demos of its products per quarter — and officially entering the market earlier this year.
“Starting in the fourth quarter last year, our sales pipeline was getting unmanageable,” Tiwari said. “We had all the indicators that we needed a Series A.”
Emerging market
Symmetry plans on using the new funding to grow its nearly 25-person team, continue building out the product and refining its go-to market strategy, Tiwari said. While companies use Palo Alto Networks’ RedLock, Splunk and an array of AWS-native tools for data security and visibility, Tiwari said no one in the market has a unified, complete offering.
The company is hoping to build quickly in an emerging market, as Tiwari said he believes as early as the second half of the year other companies could push into the sector. Possible new entries into the space could include those in data governance — such as Immuta or Privacera — or data loss prevention (DLP) providers, like Open Raven.
Byron Alsberg, co-founder and managing partner at Prefix, said the company’s product-market fit made investing in it a clear choice for his firm. “This gives companies visibility into the data they have,” he said. “And customers are being surprised by the data they didn’t know was there.”
Alsberg, who expects to have six companies from his portfolio go public this year, said he could see a similar outcome for Symmetry.
“I don’t invest in companies that I don’t think can go public,” he said. “I think Symmetry can be a public company one day.”
This blog originally appeared on Crunchbase News on June 23, 2021
