SAN FRANCISCO — Nightfall AI, which operates a cloud data loss prevention platform, has closed $40 million in Series B funding. This new round was led by WestBridge Capital, with participation from Next Play Capital and existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Venrock, Pear VC, and several professional athletes and influencers including Paul Rudd, Drew Brees, and Josh Childress. As fans of the product, multiple CISOs and security professionals invested in the round as well.
Organizations today manage high volumes of sensitive data, spanning credentials and passwords, PII, protected health information, and much more. Given the sheer volume of data and the rapid growth in the number of cloud applications in the enterprise, data sprawl is pervasive, and getting worse. The shift to a hybrid workplace has eroded the traditional perimeter, and organizations must focus on applications and services in their environment that house sensitive data – their crown jewels. Recent data breaches have proven that poor data security hygiene and accidental exposure are growing risk vectors.
Without an automated solution, monitoring these data silos today is an extremely manual and time-consuming process. “Legacy solutions aren’t designed for the cloud and don’t interface natively with modern applications, and as a result, they deliver low accuracy, incomplete coverage, and limited actionability for resource-constrained security teams. Traditional data loss prevention solutions have become ineffective and expensive to manage, and the category is in dire need of reinvention,” said Isaac Madan, co-founder and chief executive officer.
Nightfall uses machine learning to detect sensitive data with high accuracy, across applications like Slack, Salesforce, Atlassian, and GitHub, and automatically fixes data exposure and hygiene issues without end-user impact. Nightfall has a comprehensive SaaS data protection platform, as well as the Nightfall Developer Platform, an open, flexible platform for developers to integrate Nightfall’s data classification and protection capabilities anywhere. The Platform delivers Nightfall’s detection engine as a set of cloud-hosted APIs and SDKs. The company has also launched partnerships with Snyk, Cribl, Virtru, Hanzo, and more to expand its partner capabilities by embedding Nightfall’s detection capabilities into their offerings.
Innovative companies such as UserTesting and Rightway trust Nightfall to protect their data. “The Nightfall platform meaningfully reduces risk, while increasing the operational capacity of our security team,” said Karim Beldjilali, the Head of Security at Rightway, a leading healthcare technology and services company revolutionizing care navigation and pharmacy benefits. “We’re excited to see this capital infusion propel Nightfall’s growth, so that they can continue to develop market-leading products and help us protect data across our entire technology stack.” Nightfall has seen over 4,000% growth in data volume scanned through its DLP platform since 2021 and has helped its customers remediate over 40 million sensitive data findings across applications.
“We rarely come across a business that has such a differentiated offering, focus on customer satisfaction, and a strong vote of confidence from marquee customers,” said Sumir Chadha, co-founder and managing partner at WestBridge Capital, who has joined the company’s Board of Directors.
The Nightfall platform delivers faster time to value, higher operational efficiency, and truly horizontal coverage across four dimensions that make it unlike other solutions on the market:
- Invisible, out-of-the-box deployment: Integrations including Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Google Drive, Slack, and Salesforce with no end-user impact or agents to install.
- High accuracy detection: Machine learning-based detectors for credentials, secrets, PII, PHI that eliminate alert fatigue.
- In-application remediation & data context: Take action on sensitive data at a granular level, get full context on violations, and automate response, minimizing overhead.
- Developer-centric platform: Embed data classification and protection into any business logic or data flow with a set of canonical APIs, providing truly horizontal coverage.
“Data security is quickly becoming the most critical and vulnerable layer of an organization’s security stack. Nightfall is the emerging leader in cloud DLP, protecting organizations from costly data leaks and enabling strong data security hygiene without blocking business users,” said Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, Nightfall board member, and former CEO of Symantec.
Nightfall plans to more than double its headcount over the next year and will use this funding to scale its reach to more customers and markets, expand its integration and partner ecosystem, and advance the Nightfall platform with new products and use cases that customers want.
