Please welcome Teleskope, the data protection platform that automates data security, privacy, and compliance at scale
Meet Teleskope, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Founders: Elizabeth Nammour and Julie Trias
The problem: Getting a complete picture of the security and privacy posture of a company’s data is incredibly difficult. Despite rapid technological advancements, engineers are still plagued by constant manual assessments and reviews that often become obsolete as soon as they’re completed. Most data security posture management (DSPM) solutions that attempt to address this problem don’t work the way they should. All too often, they signal false positives and suffer from a lack of contextual understanding. Their inability to properly scale and integrate also frequently causes alert fatigue, putting critical data at risk. According to Fastly Research and Enterprise Strategy Group, 75% of organizations spend as much time on false positives as on verified attacks. There is a real need for a frictionless solution that integrates with existing workflows to meet the demands of the digital age and proliferation of data in every organization while helping to protect personal data and reduce the burden on security, data, and engineering teams.
Teleskope’s solution: Teleskope’s data protection platform uses state-of-the-art large language models (LLM) to provide swift, actionable insights with significantly greater accuracy. By minimizing false positives and providing critical context around data, Teleskope empowers organizations to focus on genuine vulnerabilities, allowing teams to remediate them directly at the source, or enable developers to implement any custom security or privacy protocols through open APIs. By streamlining security and privacy operations, engineers can save time, combat alert fatigue, and assume a bigger role in the protection of data. Teleskope’s advanced contextual analysis also goes far beyond traditional data classification solutions to discern whether data is actually considered Personally Identifiable Information. The company’s LLM is continuously fine-tuned and optimized for speed and cost, and quickly identifies the data subject associated with the data, such as customer, employee, and can differentiate between roles, such as doctors and patients. Finally, at a time when more and more companies are being fined for the improper handling of data, Teleskope can automatically enforce compliance requirements — including those imposed by GDPR and CCPA.
Origin story: Lizzy and Julie are seasoned security engineers who bring a combination of expertise and fresh perspective to the issue of data security. Prior to founding Teleskope, both worked at Airbnb, where they constantly wrestled with the problems that arise from manual risk assessment, including wasted resources as well as alert fatigue, which can create longer response times, or, as is often the case, can leave engineers vulnerable to missed alerts. During that time, they recognized the need to replace point-in-time spreadsheets and ad hoc scripts with automation that provides a real-time and always-up-to-date data security and privacy posture. They architected Airbnb’s data security framework as it exists today — you can read Lizzy’s detailed writing about the solution here. When the time came to branch out and build Teleskope, the duo developed a modern solution that implements recent innovations in LLM in a way that relieves the burden on engineers and significantly reduces the risk of privacy data exposed in breaches.
Why we’re betting on it: The field of cyber security needs more diversity, as well as technical leaders taking a more developer-friendly approach. Lizzy and Julie bring fresh perspective on modern security and are uniquely suited to solve the issues and pain-points that security engineers experience day in and day out — frequently to the point of burn out — and which they have grappled with personally for years. While there are a number of incumbents within the data protection space, none have managed to significantly reduce the problem of false positives and enable integration and scale. From the get-go, we were impressed with Lizzy and Julie. Their developer-centric approach, combined with their strategic use of AI to leverage best-in-class contextual classification, positions Teleskope to build the industry-leading platform that protects and secures customer information.
Our take: The explosion of data that has been accelerated by generative AI requires a paradigm shift in data protection. But the security ecosystem has been slow to adapt. Moreover, with the democratization of data, it is becoming impossible for security and data teams — many of which are small — to keep up with the massive flow of petabytes using only traditional, outmoded tools and methods of gatekeeping. Most existing solutions are not equipped to handle high volumes of data, and are only able to support simple data landscapes. But even SMBs now have complex data stores, experience high rates of false positives, and don’t integrate well into the development workflow. Early on, Lizzy and Julie spotted these shifts and the threats they produce to personal data and managed to get ahead of the curve with the development of Teleskope. We are living in a world defined by astronomical levels of data, and Lizzy and Julie knew that to meet the moment they needed to reinvent the now-antiquated framework for data protection. Leveraging AI to combat the threats of AI and the issues that arise from the widespread use of data, Teleskope provides one of the only scalable solutions that protects personal data from being commingled or shared. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Lizzy and Julie and support their vision to ensure sensitive information never falls into the wrong hands.
Further reading: “Data Security Startup Raises Pre-Seed Funding, Launches Data Protection Software Using Artificial Intelligence”
