Cyberhaven: Reinventing Enterprise Data Protection

Sometimes, a company roars out of the gate with awesome technology, identified product market fit and  a complete team. But not often. Cyberhaven now has all three, but it took some time, patience and continuous innovation to get there.

Cyberhaven is a security company that is reinventing  an increasingly essential category that is long overdue for disruption  – data loss protection (DLP). DLP helps companies keep their sensitive data from leaking out, whether from malicious actors or innocent mistakes. With data sprawl at an all-time high, there are so many kinds of data and so many ways it can (figuratively) walk out the door, creating a tough problem to solve.

Cyberhaven is taking a new approach to the problem and, in the process, completely redefining DLP to a new category they call Data Detection and Response (DDR). Using data lineage and graph analytics, DDR helps companies understand how their data flows across different apps and endpoints and then set policies about how to keep that data from being used or moved in unwanted ways.

Cyberhaven always had amazing technology and a strong technical team, led by co-founders Vova Kuznetsov, Cristian Zamfir and Radu Banabic, who met during their PhD at EPFL studying under serial cybersecurity entrepreneur George Candea. Last year, they welcomed Howard Ting as the final piece of the puzzle in their terrific leadership team. Howard joined after having served as CMO at Redis Labs and Nutanix, helping build both into multi-billion dollar companies. Howard has hired an excellent sales leader in Matt Duchesne, who joined from VMware. Cyberhaven’s world class technology team and go-to-market leadership are driving the company towards unprecedented growth. 

At every step of the way, the Cyberhaven team has shown the grit that every venture funder loves to see to get them where they are. Early to market, they kept iterating, engaging with customers, and pivoting to find the right sector where their technological edge could make a huge difference. Together, the team has now put their next-gen technology into the market in a way that customers – as varied as Motorola, Upstart, Western Digital, Harvard University, and Axos Bank – can easily understand. That’s why we’re so pleased to join in Cyberhaven’s Series B, led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from Wing Venture Capital and Forgepoint, investing out of our newly closed Opportunity Fund II. With all the puzzle pieces now in place, we’re excited to help them reinvent DLP and define the new DDR category.