ClearSky leads investment, Patrick Heim and Tim Eades join the Okera board

Okera announced the company has raised $15 million in new funding to help provide enterprises with secure data access at scale for modern analytic platforms. The strategic investment was led by ClearSky Security. The current raise brings the total funding for the company to $29.6 million and includes participation by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures. The new funding will be used to expand Okera’s investment in engineering, sales, and marketing.

Nick Halsey, who has joined Okera as CEO and board member, most recently served as President and CEO of Zoomdata. Timothy Eades, vArmour CEO and an early investor in Okera, has been named Executive Chairman and Patrick Heim, Partner and CISO at ClearSky, has joined the Okera board.

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According to Gartner, organizations are increasingly using multi-cloud architectures which introduces a layer of complexity to secure and protect data management and access. In addition, companies must comply with an evolving data privacy regulation landscape, including GDPR and CCPA with GDPR fines alone likely to exceed $1 billion by 2021.

With these evolving privacy regulations, the Okera Active Data Access Platform (ODAP) enables companies to comply and better deliver secure data access in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Data owners and stewards can now automatically discover and audit data usage in their data lake, create access policies using its visual policy engine and enforce fine-grained access. Sensitive data can be dynamically protected using obfuscation functions including tokenization, anonymization, pseudonymization, redaction, and masking.

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“Nick’s success in building large, high-performing organizations in the data management and analytics sectors makes him an ideal leader for Okera at this exciting stage of growth,” said Nong Li, Okera Co-Founder and CTO.

“It’s never been more important than today to secure data access, especially in the current climate with more employees working remotely than ever before,” said Halsey. “There’s an infinite market opportunity for us and I’m looking forward to working with Nong and the exceptionally talented team at Okera.”

“In my role as a CISO, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing companies is securing access to data while being compliant with rapidly evolving privacy regulations,” said Heim. “I was impressed with Okera’s technology and how easily it can be implemented to create a tremendous opportunity for enterprises to shift from a reactive posture for each new data security challenge to building security into their infrastructure from the ground up.”

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