INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As companies start to gather more and more data on their users and customers, including a firehose of information from a nigh-endless flow
of tests, managing and maintaining that data isn&t the only place companies are hitting a wall — and figuring out who can actually access
it is becoming just as big of a problem.
That was the experience Amandeep Khurana had throughout his career and as he kept talking to more
and more larger companies
So he and his co-founder decided to start Okera, which is looking to make it easier for stewards of various sets of data to ensure the right
people have the right access
With data coming in from a myriad of sources — and hopefully ending up in the same database — it can be increasingly complex to track
who has access to what, and the hope is that Okera can reduce that problem to flipping a few switches.
Okera is coming out of stealth mode
and said it has raised a new $12 million financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with existing investors Felicis Ventures and
Capital One Growth Ventures participating
Bessemer Ethan Kurzweil and Felicis& Wesley Chan are joining the company board of directors, and Okera has raised $14.6 million to
date.
&Iwas very underwhelmed by what other vendors were offering, there was pretty much nothing happening,& co-founderKhurana said
&There were not a lot of good solutions, and no vendor was incentivized to solve the problem
What we&d hear is, [employees] were spending so much time in data management and plumbing
We saw a trend — as more and more enterprises are moving into the cloud, so they can be agile, these problems amplified
There is a lot of friction around data management, and people spent a lot of time and resources and money making one-off solutions.&
Part of
the problem stems from larger companies looking to move their operations into the cloud
Those companies can run into the problem of data coming in from various discrete locations, where everyone is handling something
differently, and everyone has varying levels of access to that data
For example, an analyst might be trying to dig into some customer usage data in order to tweak a product, but they only have access to half
To fix that, they would need to hunt down the people who are in control of the rest of the information they need and get the right copies or
All of this includes a robust audit trail for those handling security within the company.
it is going to be an increasingly crowded space
just by virtue of the problem, especially as companies collect more and more data while they look to better train various machine learning
There are startups like Collibra also looking to improve the data governance experience for companies, and Collibra raised an additional $58
million in January this year.
But streamlining all this, in theory, reduces the overhead of just how much time it takes for those employees
to hunt down the right people, and also make sure it easier to access everything and get to work faster
For modern systems, it an all-or-nothing approach,Khurana said, and the goal is to try to make it easier for the right people to get access
to the right data when they need it
That isn&t necessarily limited to analysts, as employees in sales, marketing, and other various roles might also need access to certain
databases in their day-to-day jobs.
