- Okera has announced that it has raised $15 million in a round of funding and it named Nick Halsey as CEO and board member
Okera has announced that it has raised $15 million in a round of funding to help provide enterprises with secure data access at scale for modern analytic platforms. The strategic investment was led by ClearSky Security and includes participation by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures.
The current raise brings the company’s total funding to $29.6 million. And 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. And Timothy Eades, vArmour CEO and an early investor in Okera, has been named Executive Chairman. Patrick Heim, Partner and CISO at ClearSky, has also joined the Okera board.
Companies have to comply with an evolving data privacy regulation landscape, including GDPR and CCPA with GDPR fines alone likely to exceed $1 billion by 2021. And 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 are able to automatically discover and audit data usage in their data lake, create access policies using its visual policy engine and enforce fine-grained access. Plus sensitive data can be dynamically protected using obfuscation functions including tokenization, anonymization, pseudonymization, redaction, and masking.
Key Quotes:
“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.”
Okera Co-Founder and CTO Nong Li
“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. There’s an infinite market opportunity for us and I’m looking forward to working with Nong and the exceptionally talented team at Okera.”
-Nick Halsey
“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. 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.”
-Patrick Heim
