Harmonic Security announced it has secured $17.5 million in Series A funding to bring its unique zero-touch data protection capabilities to enterprises. Since the company launched in October last year, the total funding has reached over $26 million, with enterprise customers already in double figures.
Harmonic Security built a completely new approach to data protection using pre-trained, specialized language models. And the Series A round is being led by Next47, a leading VC firm that has invested in many cybersecurity standouts, including Claroty and Sysdig. Plus, it joins Ten Eleven Ventures which led the $7 million seed round in October 2023.
In working with dozens of CISOs and CIOs, Harmonic built an entirely new approach to data protection. And the company has trained its own language models for data protection that are based on unique datasets of highly realistic sensitive materials.
This enables Harmonic to detect all types of sensitive data in milliseconds accurately. And the extreme accuracy and speed of this approach mean that it can nudge end users towards secure best practices without overwhelming security teams.
Harmonic’s relationship with CISOs has enabled quick traction after launching its data protection product in July 2024 which is already in active use by thousands of employees. So it has generated significant attention in 2024, including being named an RSA Innovation Sandbox finalist.
Harmonic employs 30 people across the United States and the United Kingdom, and will use this latest round of funding to scale up its engineering and go-to-market efforts.
KEY QUOTES:
“Over the past 20 years, complex data classification and labeling exercises and noisy rules have created headaches for security teams, not least a huge burden of meaningless false positives. Now, with the rapid adoption of Generative AI, renewed data privacy risks mean that legacy data protection tools are not fit for purpose. Harmonic Security is redefining the entire data protection category which GenAI has brought into sharp focus, and we will use the Series A to accelerate the rapid progress we have already achieved.”
-Alastair Paterson, CEO and co-founder of Harmonic Security
“Next47 is thrilled to join Harmonic Security on its mission to reimagine data protection for the modern age. As we move towards the concept of the AI-powered SOC, Harmonic will own data protection for the GenAI era.”
-T.J. Rylander, General Partner at Next47, who will join the company’s board
“Data security is long overdue disruption. What’s even better is that Harmonic has the team to bring this to life.”
-Rinki Sethi, CISO of BILL
“Traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) methods have proven ineffective, leading CISOs to shift focus towards user authentication, authorization, and visibility. While specific types of data can be easily protected, the contextual nature of most sensitive information makes binary ‘yes or no’ controls inadequate, creating more operational friction than value.”
-Mark Sutton, CISO of Bain Capital, who recently became a board member at Harmonic to help drive this mission
