Our Investment in Cyral — Data Layer Security

On January 1, 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect — the first law in the U.S. to set up a comprehensive set of rules around consumer data, similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While CCPA and GDPR may be the regulations that take up the most airtime, countries from Brazil to Australia have developed similar legislation. Data security and privacy standards are here to stay.

Whenever there is a fundamental regulatory change, Redpoint digs in to learn more. We’ve conducted dozens of interviews with buyers, surveyed the landscape, and shared some of our analysis here. Our research found, unsurprisingly, that data security is a top priority for businesses of all sizes. In addition to the regulatory catalyst, the data security market exhibits some powerful trends:

• According to IDC, the world’s data will grow from about 29 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025, increasing 66 percent per year.
• A Risk Based Security report found that data breaches in the first six months of 2019 increased by 54 percent compared to the same period the previous year. Large enterprises like CapitalOne, Adobe, Marriott, Burger King, and Facebook suffered significant data breaches in 2019.
• IBM reported that in 2019 the global average cost of a data breach continued to increase to $3.9M, up 12 percent over the past five years.

Security teams not only bear a regulatory call to action, but also face an expanding attack surface, increasing attack frequency, and worsening pain from a breach. Teams deserve a world-class solution that makes their data safe, secure, and compliant, turning GDPR and CCPA from four-letter words back to acronyms.

Enter Cyral, a cloud-native service that seamlessly monitors and secures access to the data layer without changing apps, services, or workflows. Host-based solutions with agents and watchpoints are incompatible with modern environments. Cyral’s agentless, API-first approach supports data architectures deploying database-as-a-service instances, pipelines, and cloud data warehouses.

The solution offers multiple security benefits: 1) automated data layer-wide catalog discovery and sensitive data classification, 2) unified privilege management across all users, apps, and services, and 3) data exfiltration prevention. It averts database password spraying, service account takeover, credential phishing, among other threat vectors — which is why we believe so strongly in it.

We are excited about Cyral not just because of the HUGE market opportunity and differentiated architecture, but also the incredible team. Co-founders Manav Mital and Srini Vadlamani are repeat entrepreneurs with deep technical expertise. Manav founded and scaled Instart while Srini spent his entire career focused on data systems. Together they are uniquely positioned to build Cyral.

We’re excited to share that Redpoint has led the Series A investment in Cyral alongside Costanoa Ventures and A.Capital Partners. We are thrilled to partner with Manav, Srini, and the entire team on the journey forward to reimagine the data security layer.

If you are interested in joining Cyral’s stellar team, please check out their careers page here.