Data privacy platform Exonar has secured £6.5 million in funding.
The Newbury-headquartered cyber security company enables companies to understand immediately what data is held where across billions of emails, digital archives, documents and databases – a valuable tool following the introduction of GDPR last year.
For example, if someone put a subject access request into a bank, it would be able to see instantly what information was held in what documents and create a plan to update or delete them.
Transatlantic venture capital investor Beringea, which is planning to deploy £80m in UK businesses, led the investment with participation from Downing Ventures, the early-stage investor, alongside notable existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners and Winton Ventures.
Beringea led a £9m investment round into FinTech company AccessPay recently.
Exonar founder Adrian Barrett has previously worked for Cisco and global network data specialist Lumeta.
“These are exciting times for Exonar. To receive significant backing from Beringea and Downing Ventures reinforces our belief that the Exonar platform has a significant role to play in enterprise-level data discovery and management,” he said.
“We have a clear vision for future development and the investment will enable us to further enhance our product, enabling our customers to meet current and future data demands such as GDPR and CCPA swiftly, simply and at scale.
“Data is the backbone of modern business. And yet, it also poses an existential risk, which has traditionally required substantial resources and investment to manage.
“Exonar transforms this dynamic with a platform that maps and understands petabytes of information in seconds.”
Data discovery technology is proving vital to businesses that can easily hold petabytes of data across their entire information estate.
The significant growth of data value has led to industry analysts estimating that the global data governance software market will grow 22 per cent annually over the next five years to a value of $3.5bn by 2023.
Stuart Veale, managing partner of Beringea, commented: “Beringea has backed Exonar’s leadership and pioneering technology to create a cornerstone of data governance.”
James Lewis, Investment Director at Downing Ventures, commented: “Not a day goes by that we don’t hear about the importance of accessing and making better use of data in all our businesses – Exonar is at the forefront of shaping and solving this challenge and we’re delighted to be part of the journey with Adrian and the team.”