BigID Raises $60M, Eyes M&A Around Data Security, Compliance

A data security vendor led by a former CA Technologies executive raised $60 million to accelerate both organic and inorganic expansion around data and compliance.

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New York-based BigID said the growth round will build on the company’s new data hygiene capabilities – which clean up the generative AI data pipeline from discovery through staging and enrichment – as well as its new controls for detecting and tracking model access to sensitive data. The investment was led by Riverwood Capital and included participation from Silver Lake Waterman and existing supporter Advent.

“With corporate attention now turning to enabling responsible and trusted AI, BigID is uniquely positioned to help companies address the novel challenges of unstructured training data, including quality, bias, privacy, access, sovereignty and more,” co-founder and CEO Dimitri Sirota said in a statement. “This funding gives BigID additional capital to accelerate and scale.”

BigID retained its unicorn status in the latest funding round, notching a valuation in excess of $1 billion. The company first became a unicorn in December 2020 when it closed a $70 million Series D funding round at a $1.25 billion valuation. BigID most recently hauled in $30 million from private equity firm Advent International in April 2021 and has raised some $320 million since being established in 2016 (see: BigID CEO on How to Govern Unstructured Data Informing LLMs).

How BigID’s Growth Compares to Competitors

Any acquisition by BigID would be the first in the company’s more than eight-year history. BigID in 2022 was the world’s fourth-largest data privacy compliance software vendor, with $64.7 million in revenue and 8.1% market share, putting the firm behind OneTrust, Securiti and TrustArc, IDC found. BigID’s 16.6% growth rate, however, lags the sector as a whole, which grew by 27.6% in 2022 to $798.1 million.

“We are excited to partner with what we consider to be a category leader with a software platform that can address data discovery, classification, management and security, as enterprises are increasingly faced with new complexities like the proliferation of data and cybersecurity risks, adoption of AI, role of the cloud and evolving regulatory pressures,” said Riverwood Managing Partner Francisco Alvarez-Demalde.

The company has been led since its inception by Sirota, who oversaw strategy for CA Technologies’ API and security business units for more than two years before co-founding BigID. Sirota told Information Security Media Group in August that organizations struggle with governing the data that goes into and informs large language models since it’s in documents rather than spreadsheets or SQL databases.

“The exponential growth of generative AI is driving new cybersecurity needs, and the BigID team has built a leading data-centric security platform that sits at the core of enterprises to help protect their most critical data,” Silver Lake Waterman Managing Director Shawn O’Neill said in a statement.

How BigID Defends Unstructured Data in AI Models

Companies need a governance framework that determines if personal identifiable information such as Social Security numbers or confidential health data is being shared with a large language model, Sirota said in August. Unstructured data has relied on its own set of technologies for management and security since the blocks of text have no enumeration and could include image data or binary data.

“Historically, most of the governance tooling has been oriented around structured data – data that feels or looks like a spreadsheet that could be in a SQL database or a data warehouse,” Sirota said in August. “And so there’s a little mismatch in terms of the data that you historically have governed for your analytics and the data that you need to govern to inform your conversational AI.”

The company said it has pioneered the concept of universal data security, compliance and privacy across structured, unstructured and semi-structured data, protecting information in public cloud, SaaS or on-premises data center environments. Moving away from products purpose-built for specific data types has driven return on investment for customers as they build out their modern data infrastructure, BigID said.

BigID’s headcount has inched ahead over the past year from 546 employees in March 2023 to 569 staff today, IT-Harvest found. The firm’s workforce is equally split between the United States and Israel, and the remaining 13% of staffers are in countries such as the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, France and Mexico. IT-Harvest said BigID has sales of $73.7 million, and the firm disclosed ARR near $100 million.