Startup BigID raises $ 70 million and becomes a unicorn

The BigID privacy management startup is once again surpassing the wave of public and regulatory requirements for maintaining user privacy. A little less than a year after a $ 50 million round of capital raising, the company announced another round of raising $ 70 million on Wednesday. According to the company, the fundraising was valued at more than $ 1 billion, making it another in a growing line of Israeli “unicorns” – companies valued at $ 1 billion or more.

This raising comes after the company raised $ 50 million in January 2020, but did not report at any value. However, four months before the same raising, the company also raised a sum of $ 50 million, when according to IVC data, this round was made at a value of $ 350 million.

BigID, founded in 2016 by Dimitri Sirota and Nimrod Wax, has developed a platform for managing and enforcing online information privacy policies in accordance with regulatory requirements and stringent regulations such as European GDPR legislation and California privacy laws. Among the company’s customers are large organizations such as Microsoft, SAP and Amazon, which are committed to complying with privacy regulations. This requires them to store and manage the information in a secure and well-managed manner.

“Annual doubling of employees and customers”

The current round of funding was led by the investment fund of enterprise software giant Salesforce, which entered with a low investment amount in the previous round of funding, alongside Tiger Global Fund, which led the previous round. The round was also attended by the Glynn Capital Fund, which joined existing investors, Bessemer, and the Scale Venture Partners and Boldstart Ventures funds. According to the company announcement, the deal included primary and secondary shares.

BigID employs about 250 people worldwide, with close to 100 employed in Israel. Most of the development takes place in the center of Tel Aviv, with the company headquartered in New York. The company also has offices in London, Singapore, Brazil, India and Australia, and a presence in a number of other countries in Europe and Asia. “We have doubled every year in recent years in both the number of employees and customers,” said Wax, who serves as the company’s VP of products, in a conversation with Globes. Managing customer relationships and business processes, with BigID providing data intelligence that can significantly improve the capabilities of these solutions. “

The corona has increased demand for privacy protection

“We get a lot of attention from investors who understand the new situation that has arisen, where a new market of privacy and information protection is emerging.” Says Wax. He said, even before the Corona, “organizations have collected and still collect unlimited amounts of personal information, which has not been deleted. At the same time, hackers are exploiting this information and stealing with it because it can be used for all criminal purposes. At the same time, legislation is being formulated around the world.” “The privacy of the people they collect information about. This is a trend that started in Europe, and expanded to the United States, first with the CCPA privacy legislation in California, and later with the CCPR, which tightens it even further and deals specifically with advertisers – the entire ad-tech industry.”

Developments in the industry following the corona have, according to Wax, increased demand for systems developed by BigID and it now targets not only large financial or manufacturing organizations, but also smaller companies “that hold hundreds of millions of citizens’ databases and need to protect them.” In addition, the company has in the past year begun to develop products that will expand its customer base from IT people only, also for developer teams that deal with data on users.

“Following the corona, the public and the whole world has moved to online marketing and shopping. There is more and more information exposed online. All online shopping. All our behavior. Personal, medical information has also been revealed. There is much more monitoring of citizens and this raises awareness of privacy and discourse. “The state is allowed to monitor citizens and intervene happening all over the world, not just in the country,” he said.

Other changes in market conditions that have occurred in the past year are a shift from warnings to fines for private violations in Europe under the GDPR, and at the same time – an increase in cyber-assault incidents following the move to work from home caused by the Corona plague. The BigID system helps to map out the information that the organization does not always know where it is hiding. “One of our customers said that following the burglary affair with the insurance company Shirbit, he performed a search, in which he found credit card details in places where they were not supposed to be at all.”

And even if the organization is hacked, Wax explained, “he still needs to be able to find out exactly who among the customers were harmed, and what exactly their information was leaked. It is obligated to notify all customers of a potential injury, instead of being able to notify only those who have been injured, and to reduce exposure. “

The company’s product, which was originally intended to locate information to protect privacy, now appeals, according to Wax, not only to those who are supposed to protect it, but also to those who want to derive value from it, such as analysts of that company.

Similar to what was said during the previous recruitment, this time too the company claims that it does not need the money raised for immediate activities. According to Wax, most of the previous fundraising has not yet been used either. “We agreed to accept the sums because the proposals were good and worthwhile, and they will allow us to grow significantly later and take more risks. The previous investment did allow us to enter a very aggressive app building program that would allow us to enter areas beyond privacy, also for information protection in general, and to develop Solutions in the information security market. “

“The new funding will allow for the development of solutions for developers as well -” The new funding will allow new tools to be built that will be simpler and faster to implement, eliminating the need for IT people in the organization, and building the sales force, “said Wax. “A development manager in the Amazon AWS cloud environment, who can within minutes of installing BigID give him a picture of all the information he stores in AWS without a long sales process, and without having to involve the IT organization in his company.”

The numbers of BigID

$ 214 million – total fundraising since its inception in 2016
$ 50 million – the scope of the round of funding in January 2020
$ 350 million – the value at which $ 50 million was raised in September 2019
250 – The number of employees employed by the company, 100 of them in Israel

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