Nightfall AI Emerges from Stealth with $20.3 Million to Secure Data in the Cloud

Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock Co-Lead Investment with Enrique Salem Joining the Board

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – November 7, 2019

Nightfall AI (formerly known as Watchtower AI), the industry’s first cloud-native data loss prevention platform, launched today with $20.3 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock. Pear VC, Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian, and Kelvin Beachum of the New York Jets also participated in the round. Funding proceeds will be used to deepen the scope of the Nightfall platform and continue to expand the company’s business reach.

Nightfall leverages machine learning and natural language processing to discover, classify, and protect sensitive information across SaaS and data infrastructure, providing continuous protection for cloud services like Slack, GitHub, and AWS. Nightfall also ensures proactive compliance with a number of regulatory regimes, including CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA.

Nowadays business-critical data in the enterprise is sprayed across a broad set of disparate cloud systems. This leads to information security problems around data leakage, exfiltration, as well as compliance risk. The urgency of this problem is exacerbated by the move to cloud, and frustration with first-gen vendors that are highly inaccurate, without remediation and holistic cloud coverage.

As a founding team member of UberEats, Chief Technology Officer Rohan Sathe experienced the problem that Nightfall is solving firsthand. While at Uber, Sathe built backend systems to handle petabytes of consumer data across thousands of SaaS and data infrastructure products in real time, helping grow UberEats to $7 billion in revenue and over 200 engineers.

“When you have data scattered across numerous fragmented systems, not to mention people communicating in real time, it’s inevitable that sensitive information will get sprayed,” said Sathe. “Nightfall acts as a continuous shield, providing administrators the option of manually taking action on the data, leveraging automated workflows to prevent data loss, or classifying data historically for compliance.”

“Our mission at Nightfall is to build the control plane for cloud data, enabling enterprises to know what data they have across the cloud, and to proactively manage and protect that information,” said Isaac Madan, Nightfall Chief Executive Officer. Madan was previously on the investment team at Venrock, an early-stage venture capital firm with a storied history in cybersecurity, with recent exits including CloudFlare and Evident.io, dating back to Vontu, Imperva, and CheckPoint. 

The Nightfall team has prior experience at platform tech and cybersecurity companies, including Uber, Atlassian, Deliveroo, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Akamai.

In under a year, Nightfall has scaled rapidly among high-tech growth startups and Fortune 500 enterprises alike. Josh Sosnin, CISO of Ellucian, a cloud software provider in the higher education industry, credits Nightfall with helping to secure Ellucian’s Slack communications for the company’s 3,000-plus employees. “Nightfall has been indispensable in our data security program at Ellucian. The team has been incredibly responsive and focused on continually improving the platform for new use cases,” said Sosnin.

The platform is ahead of the market in delivering an approach that has high classification efficacy, and delivers measurable productivity enhancements to security teams through straightforward deployment and automation. “Nightfall’s platform deployed in seconds, and quickly became a core component of our security program. The platform’s accuracy and automation capabilities limit the need for manual intervention, while delivering continuous protection in environments like Slack," said Michael Laurenzano, CTO of Clinc, an enterprise artificial intelligence firm servicing highly regulated industries. “Nothing on the market comes close to this,” added Laurenzano.

Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, will join Nightfall’s Board of Directors. Salem has a distinguished history in software and cybersecurity, as the former CEO of Symantec, as well as serving as a Board Director at DocuSign and Atlassian. “Isaac, Rohan, and the Nightfall team are addressing a deep and profound need in the world of information security, where I have spent nearly three decades of my career. With the proliferation of data across the cloud, high accuracy content inspection that is easy to operationalize is more important than ever. Nightfall has built a powerful and elegant solution to this problem. We are delighted to have been investors since the very beginning and to continue deepening our partnership with the team,” said Salem.

Experience Nightfall:

• Integrate Nightfall with any Slack workspace to detect sensitive data in chat (www.nightfall.ai/integrations/slack), or GitHub to detect sensitive keys & credentials in code (radar.nightfall.ai).
• Nightfall is hiring - explore open opportunities at www.nightfall.ai/careers. 

About Nightfall

Nightfall AI (www.nightfall.ai), formerly known as Watchtower AI, is building the control plane for cloud data. The Nightfall platform discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive data across cloud apps and data infrastructure via machine learning & NLP. Today, enterprises keep business-critical data across a broad set of disparate systems, such Slack, AWS, and GitHub. This leads to information security problems around data leakage, exfiltration, as well as compliance risk around regimes such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA. As the industry's first cloud-native data loss prevention platform, Nightfall has scaled rapidly to a broad set of customers, ranging from hyper-growth tech startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, across consumer-facing & highly-regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, and education. 

About Bain Capital Ventures

Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from SaaS, infrastructure software and security to fintech and healthcare to commerce and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, Lime, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, Rubrik, SendGrid and SurveyMonkey. Bain Capital Ventures has $5.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Venrock

Originally established as the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family in 1969, Venrock partners with entrepreneurs to build some of the world’s most disruptive, successful companies. With a primary focus on technology and healthcare, portfolio companies have included Apple, Check Point Software, Cloudflare, Dollar Shave Club, DoubleClick, Imperva, Intel, and Nest. For more information, please visit Venrock’s website at www.venrock.com and follow the firm on Twitter at @venrock.

Media Contact: Maria Vazquez, hello@nightfall.ai