Our investment in Metomic, the employee-centric cybersecurity solution
Today, we are proud to announce our investment in $20m Metomic’s Series A, alongside prominent cyber-focused US VC Evolution Equity, and with backing from the existing investor Connect Ventures.
The development of SaaS applications has been a boon for human and talent productivity thanks to better collaboration, real-time communication and creativity enhancement. However, this increase in creativity and productivity comes with a major downside. Information and data are circulating faster than ever with no real control from management. Remember that Google spreadsheet with sensitive data that you gave public access to, shared with many people, and completely forgot about? Chances are that this document is probably living somewhere in the cloud, silently waiting to be discovered by anyone with the link.
In 2019, when still at Balderton, I had the chance to lead the Series A of GitGuardian, whose first product was used by security teams to monitor and detect API keys and credentials in developers’ source code. I saw first-hand how GitGuardian saved many companies from dramatic leaks by immediately detecting when developers were pushing sensitive data in code. Metomic has transposed this core principle of protecting developers from unintentional code security leaks to every employee and every SaaS.
Every piece of data stored in SaaS is two or three clicks away from being accessed by anyone. It’s a dream for employees but a nightmare for heads of security and compliance. Metomic is operating at the intersection of three dimensions: SaaS x Data X Employee. For all data a head of security wants to monitor, Metomic is able to build a classifier to know exactly where the data is sitting across the company’s SaaS stack and who has access to it (internally or externally).
This, in turn, allows security teams to write remediation workflows. As a bank CISO, you do not want PII (Personal Identifying Information) such as an email, social security number, or credit card, to be published on Slack. No problem, Metomic got your back and can erase it. Likewise, if you only want a subset of your employees to have access to financial data, you can set it up on Metomic. The set of use cases is broad.
Metomic is building the human firewall. Unlike other standard DLP tools, built-in intelligence enables Metomic to understand the context of who has access to which data and where, which tremendously reduces false positives and allows security teams to focus on real threats.
When I met with the Metomic founders, Rich and Ben, it was clear privacy was a problem close to their heart. After spending time building a cookie management platform, they realized that giving businesses control on how sensitive data is shared and used was a much bigger issue.
Today, Metomic is working with companies from multiple sectors: banking, insurance, HR, energy, etc. The Series A funding will be used to continue developing their platform and launch in the US.
Resonance is honored to be part of Metomic’s journey! And if you want to come onboard the rocket ship, Metomic is hiring massively in Europe and the US!
