Today, I am excited to share that we have completed a series B funding of $50M led by Insight Partners. Insight Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology and software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. We look forward to leveraging their expertise as we fast-track our go-to-market strategy and further extend our investment in our cloud-first, unified system for data governance security and privacy across multiple cloud services.
Privacera has been capital efficient in our journey since our start in 2016. In May of last year, we raised our Series A and had a strong cash balance coming into 2021. Our customer growth rate has been phenomenal in the last few years, adding numerous Fortune 500 customers across finance, insurance, healthcare, retail, media, and consumer industries. They have all expressed the importance of data privacy and governance, how it has become a central pillar for business operations, and that it is now a board-level topic.
We are proud of our growth but more importantly, that Privacera helps some of the world’s biggest brands in their mission to leverage data to make better business decisions while balancing data governance, security, privacy, and compliance. So, why did we raise this new round?
Our first objective was to accelerate the execution of our broad vision. Enterprises today are looking for a single pane of glass with visibility into their data in the public cloud and need easier ways to manage policies for granular data access control across multiple on-prem and cloud services. Since Series A, we have made significant strides on the product and partner integration front – from our latest AWS-EMR integration for Hive, Presto, and Spark services, support for Databricks SQL Analytics, the introduction of the Privacera Encryption Gateway, and the industry’s first SaaS-Based data governance and security platform PrivaceraCloud. This funding will help us to accelerate and further expand our ecosystem of cloud storage, analytics, and reporting environments including, AWS, Azure, Collibra, Databricks, Dremio, Google Cloud, Snowflake, Starburst, Talend, and more.
Beyond expanding our coverage, Privacera continues to push forward and amplify our investments in SaaS. Having pioneered the industry’s first and only SaaS-based data governance and security solution capable of integrating privacy and compliance across multiple cloud services earlier this year, we have received tremendous response from the market. However, we are only scratching the surface of the capabilities we can offer. This funding will enable us to deepen our investment in our SaaS-first strategy and continue to innovate to ensure our customers can enable comprehensive data governance and security with the click of a button.
This recent funding is also a forward planning move to improve financial viability. We have been very efficient with capital so far and we could continue to grow the business using the same sound financial fundamentals. However, we realize no one has a crystal ball into the future and we cannot control external events. We are still coming to terms with a global pandemic and we will experience some bumps in the economy as we come out of this later this year. This funding round gives us the freedom to focus on building a long-lasting company and ensure we continue to build the best-in-class product offering. We truly believe that any data security and data governance is a long game and run our own company on those same principles.
We are humbled by the participation from new and existing investors, as this is a clear testament from the investor community that our architectural approach and our customer traction are leading the market. This is the next step in our journey for solving data privacy and governance problems at a petabyte-scale across the diversity of on-prem and cloud systems in use today and in the future.
Check out this short video to learn more about our technology and the business drivers that prompted our investors to make their investments. Then join us as we embark on the next step of our journey by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter. We thank our new and existing investors, Insight Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Accel, Cervin Ventures, and Point 72 for supporting us during our next phase of growth and helping us continue to bring our mission to every global enterprise.
