Sentra, a data security company based in New York and Tel Aviv, has raised $150 million in an investment led by Capital One Ventures, the venture arm of the US bank. The company announced the round on Wednesday, 4 November, and describes its product as security for company data in an age of AI agents.
The round
Capital One Ventures led the round, which Sentra calls a strategic investment and, on its blog, its Series C. Existing backers also took part:
- Bessemer Venture Partners
- Zeev Ventures
- Standard Investments
- Munich Re Ventures
- Key1 Capital
A representative of Capital One will join Sentra's board. Sentra did not disclose its valuation.
What the company does
Sentra's software looks for sensitive information spread across cloud services, business apps, data warehouses, office file shares and the knowledge stores that AI tools draw from. It labels that data and then maps who, and what, can open it: employees, service accounts and AI agents, including access an agent has inherited from elsewhere.
Instead of checking every request an agent makes as it happens, Sentra works on data while it is stored. The company splits its approach into three stages:
- Before an agent goes live: shrink what it could expose by enforcing minimum access and clearing out old or risky data.
- During an incident: flag unusual access to sensitive files and remove access or risky sharing automatically.
- After: show what an agent could have reached, so security, legal and compliance teams can respond.
Sentra says its analysis runs inside each customer's own environment, so the data is never copied out.
"AI agents are now the busiest consumers of enterprise data, and many of them inherit access to data that hasn't been fully classified or governed,"Yoav Regev, co-founder and CEO, Sentra
What the money is for
Sentra plans to spend on product work in four areas: wider visibility into agents, copilots and models and the sensitive data they touch; ongoing minimum access for human and non-human accounts; protection of stored data before agents reach it; and fast containment when an agent behaves unexpectedly. It will also grow its sales teams and partner programmes, spend more on marketing and move into new countries.
Customers and numbers
Sentra reported more than 300% growth over the past year. Ride-hailing company Lyft is a named customer; its chief information security officer, Chaim Sanders, said his teams need to know which data their agents can reach before switching them on.
Background
Sentra was founded in 2021 by Yoav Regev, Asaf Kochan, Ron Reiter and Yair Cohen. Security for AI agents is drawing heavy investment this week: on 3 November CrowdStrike agreed to buy Fiddler AI, which records and explains what agents do. All rounds are tracked in AI Money.
Announced by Sentra in its newsroom: read the announcement
