Concentric AI, a California startup jostling for space in the crowded Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) space, has banked $45 million in a Series B funding round to expand its AI-powered product offerings.

The company said the capital was provided by Top Tier Capital Partners, HarbourVest Partners, CyberFuture, Ballistic Ventures, Engineering Capital, Clear Ventures, and Citi Ventures.  

Concentric AI and its investors are gearing up to compete in a lucrative data security governance market that includes DSPM and Data Access Governance (DAG) technologies. The company cited data showing the market could exceed $8 billion by 2027 as organizations spend to reduce data breaches and meet compliance requirements.

The company is building a “Semantic Intelligence” product capable of autonomously discovering, monitoring, and protecting sensitive data. Concentric AI said the product combines deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) to assess risks and remediate security issues across on-premises and cloud environments. 

The platform integrates with widely used databases, messaging platforms, email services, and generative AI tools, including Microsoft Copilot.  

The company, which emerged from stealth in 2020 with an AI document classification product, said its mission is to secure data-centric work using AI to protect business-critical information hidden in the numerous applications, data stores and databases. 

Concentric AI is among a cadre of well-capitalized early startups hawking machine learning tools to help businesses pinpoint security risks to digital assets in multi-cloud environments.  

The emergence of these new DSPM startups suggest a major gap in the way data stores are protected and new tools to help different teams in an organization to discover and classify attack paths to sensitive data stored in AWS, Azure or GCP.

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