ClearSky leads investment, Patrick Heim and Tim Eades join the Okera board
SAN FRANCISCO, April 7, 2020 — Okera today announced the company has raised $15 million in new funding to help provide enterprises with secure data access at scale for modern analytic platforms. The strategic investment was led by ClearSky Security. The current raise brings the total funding for the company to $29.6 million and includes participation by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures. The new funding will be used to expand Okera’s investment in engineering, sales, and marketing.
Nick Halsey, who has joined Okera as CEO and board member, most recently served as President and CEO of Zoomdata. Timothy Eades, vArmour CEO and an early investor in Okera, has been named Executive Chairman and Patrick Heim, Partner and CISO at ClearSky, has joined the Okera board.
According to Gartner, organizations are increasingly using multi-cloud architectures which introduces a layer of complexity to secure and protect data management and access. In addition, companies must comply with an evolving data privacy regulation landscape, including GDPR and CCPA with GDPR fines alone likely to exceed $1 billion by 2021.
With these evolving privacy regulations, the Okera Active Data Access Platform (ODAP) enables companies to comply and better deliver secure data access in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Data owners and stewards can now automatically discover and audit data usage in their data lake, create access policies using its visual policy engine and enforce fine-grained access. Sensitive data can be dynamically protected using obfuscation functions including tokenization, anonymization, pseudonymization, redaction, and masking.
“Nick’s success in building large, high-performing organizations in the data management and analytics sectors makes him an ideal leader for Okera at this exciting stage of growth,” said Nong Li, Okera Co-Founder and CTO.
“It’s never been more important than today to secure data access, especially in the current climate with more employees working remotely than ever before,” said Halsey. “There’s an infinite market opportunity for us and I’m looking forward to working with Nong and the exceptionally talented team at Okera.”
“In my role as a CISO, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing companies is securing access to data while being compliant with rapidly evolving privacy regulations,” said Heim. “I was impressed with Okera’s technology and how easily it can be implemented to create a tremendous opportunity for enterprises to shift from a reactive posture for each new data security challenge to building security into their infrastructure from the ground up.”
About Okera
Okera provides secure data access at scale so that data teams have the confidence to unlock the power of their data for innovation and growth. By ensuring that appropriate data access controls are in place and meet the evolving data privacy landscape, the Okera Active Data Access Platform can automatically discover and audit data lakes, create access policies using its visual policy engine, and enforce fine-grained access in multi-cloud environments such as AWS and Azure. Okera is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, ClearSky Security, and Felicis Ventures. Learn more at www.okera.com or contact us at [email protected].
About ClearSky Security
ClearSky is a venture capital/growth equity firm that has been operating since 2012 with offices in Florida, New York, Boston and San Francisco. ClearSky is currently investing through two funds: ClearSky Security and ClearSky Power & Technology. ClearSky Security invests in companies that offer transformative security solutions, with a special focus on cybersecurity, privacy, compliance and data governance. ClearSky Power & Technology invests in innovative companies providing technology and services to enterprise customers, with a special focus on the power and enterprise software/infrastructure sectors.
