In the enterprise, there’s been an explosive growth of data — think documents, videos, audio files, posts on social media and even emails. According to a Matillion and IDG survey, data volumes are growing by 63% per month in some organizations — and data’s coming from an increasing number of places. The same survey found the average number of data sources per organization is now 400 sources, and that more than 20% of companies surveyed were drawing from 1,000 or more data sources to feed their business intelligence and analytics systems.
Much of the aforementioned data is unstructured, meaning it’s not organized in a predefined way (unliked, say, a database of names and addresses). That’s problematic, because storing unstructured data tends to be on the difficult side — it’s often locked away in various storage systems, edge data centers and clouds, impeding both visibility and control.
This led entrepreneurs Kumar Goswami, Krishna Subramanian and Michael Peercy to found Komprise, an unstructured data management platform for enterprise customers. Komprise claims it can scan petabytes of file and object data, bringing visibility on data assets and a dashboard to search for files by metadata, department and original owners.
“[Our] customers are enterprises facing exponential data growth, often with petabytes of data under management across multiple sectors, especially healthcare and life sciences, public sector, higher education and financial services,” Goswami, who serves as Komprise’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Komprise is focused on building a strong business with a loyal and growing customer base and has been judicious with external capital. This approach helps us weather potential headwinds as we build a self-sustaining business.”
Investors must believe it’s a solid approach, as well, given that Komprise this week managed to close a $37 million funding round from Canaan Partners, Celesta Capital, Multiplier Capital and Top Tier Ventures. To date, the company’s raised $85 million in venture capital, which Goswami says is being put toward go-to-market initiatives, expanding Komprise’s channel partnerships and growing the platform with a “heavy emphasis” on cloud data migration, lifecycle management and self-service for line of business departments and users.
The bulk of the investment is equity, but there’s some debt — Goswami wouldn’t give a ratio or percentage. He did reveal, however, that it’s not a “down round” in the sense that Komprise’s valuation increased with its closing.
Goswami — who met Peercy while a product VP at Citrix after the company acquired Goswami’s previous startup, Kaviza — explained that Komprise performs analytics to present insights on a company’s data usage. Komprise can create a data management plan to move data to the right place at the right time, he averred, deploying automated workflows to find data across storage environments while tagging and enriching the data and sending it to external tools for analysis.
“Komprise can move data as it ages to lower-cost storage such as object storage in the cloud and policies can also be set to delete data after a period. [The platform can move] data without disrupting user access or existing data protection mechanisms thus ensuring greater ongoing data storage and backup savings without any hassles,” Goswami said. “Beyond cost savings, Komprise helps organizations uncover value in their unstructured data, which is too often locked away in expensive storage silos.”
So what else can enterprises do with Komprise? Goswami pitches it as a compliance solution as well as a means to manage costs. For example, he says, with Komprise, a company can run searches to find sensitive customer data residing on “non-compliant” file shares, or create different retention, storage, deletion and backup policies for data based on its usage and business purpose.
Lest potential customers be dissuaded by privacy concerns, Komprise says that it doesn’t store customer data. It only records the metadata or tags about data, and keeps that information in customer-specified and -owned locations.
“Storage and cloud vendors all have basic data management and migration features, but Komprise is unique in being able to work across on-premises, cloud and edge environments to deliver, analyze and automate data movement transparently as well as provide ongoing data lifecycle management and smart data workflows,” Goswami said. “Komprise is able to right-size these investments, while helping customers get more value from their existing and future IT infrastructure.”
More than a few organizations seem to be persuaded. Komprise claims to have over 300 customers in total, with the largest concentrations in industries like pharmaceuticals, healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment, financial services and the public sector (including military).
When asked about economic headwinds, Goswami says he doesn’t anticipate them majorly affecting businesses. In fact, he credits the pandemic and related supply chain issues with accelerating — not dampening — 150-employee Komprise’s growth. The company grew 306% from 2018 to 2021, Goswami says, although it’s unclear what exactly “growth” means in this context; Goswami declined to elaborate.
“Since the pandemic, customers have accelerated their transformation to the cloud and are more focused on cost optimization. As Komprise helps customers with both of these initiatives, our growth has accelerated during this time. Komprise is focused on building a strong business with a loyal and growing customer base and has been judicious with external capital,” Goswami said. “This approach helps us weather potential headwinds as we build a self-sustaining business.”