Latest news with #EranBarak
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
MIND Raises $30M Series A Funding to Deliver Autonomous Data Loss Prevention Through AI
Led by Paladin Capital Group and Crosspoint Capital Partners, MIND is already serving Fortune 1000 companies across diverse industries SEATTLE, June 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- MIND™, the upcoming leader in data loss prevention (DLP), today announced $30M Series A funding, just seven months after emerging from stealth, led by Paladin Capital Group and Crosspoint Capital Partners with participation from Okta Ventures and existing investor YL Ventures. This round brings MIND's total funding to over $40M and will fuel MIND's strategic growth and enhance its data security platform capabilities. In the past seven months, MIND has achieved 500% customer growth, gained significant traction among Fortune 1000 companies, prevented sensitive data loss across hundreds of thousands of endpoints through its proprietary endpoint agent and delivered immediate value by protecting the sensitive data of leading enterprises. Recently, MIND was named one of the top 10 finalists – and the only DLP startup – for the 20th annual RSAC™ 2025 Conference Innovation Sandbox contest. "MIND was founded to help organizations thrive in the AI era and navigate the exponential growth of sensitive data in complex IT environments," said Eran Barak, Co-Founder and CEO of MIND. "Our rapid growth reflects a clear market shift toward smarter, faster and fully automated approaches to DLP and insider risk. This funding validates both our product and the market demand. With the backing of our new investors, each bringing deep expertise in data security, we're positioned to revolutionize the DLP category, empower secure innovation and double our R&D and go-to-market teams by year's end." Organizations are overwhelmed by a surge in unstructured data and legacy DLP tools can't keep up. They rely on manual policies, produce excessive false positives and lack the context to detect real risk. In 2024, over 1.7 billion individuals were affected by data breaches, with the average breach costing $4.88 million, marking a 10% increase from the previous year and the highest ever recorded. In addition, insider risk is top of mind for every organization with the current macro environment, corporate and federal layoffs, and high-profile incidents with North Korean IT workers and manipulated employees, such as the recent data breach at Coinbase. For security teams, the pressure is higher than ever. Real-time insider threat detection and rapid response are no longer optional; they're essential. As the first AI-native DLP platform, MIND puts DLP and insider risk management (IRM) programs on autopilot to autonomously find sensitive data, fix data risk issues and stop data leaks at machine speed. MIND takes a unique approach by combining data security posture and data loss prevention in one unified platform. MIND AI, the company's multi-layer classification engine, delivers posture through the discovery and classification of sensitive data that matters and reduces DLP false positives to nearly zero. It automates workflows to enable security teams to proactively remediate data risks with minimal manual effort. Prevention starts with the real-time detection and blocking of attempts – whether malicious or inadvertent – to exfiltrate sensitive data out of an organization's digital environments. MIND's immediate and autonomous decision-making uses both the sensitivity of the content, combined with the understanding of the business context, to determine normal user behaviors versus high-risk behaviors that should be stopped. "AI is transforming how enterprises access and leverage data – but also how they lose it. As large language models make sensitive data instantly available to employees through natural language prompts, DLP has re-emerged as a critical, hair-on-fire problem. MIND has built an AI-native solution designed for this new era, unifying real-time posture and prevention in a single, modern platform," said Gibb Witham, Senior Vice President, Paladin Capital Group. "Led by Eran and his team, who have built some of the most successful machine learning–driven cybersecurity automation companies of the past decade, MIND has quickly established itself as the market leader in protecting sensitive enterprise data and redefining DLP for the age of AI." "As the former CEO of Symantec, which, at the time, led the market for CASB and DLP, it's clear that today's existing tools need to evolve in this new AI era. Enterprises need a modern and unified approach to DLP, and MIND is delivering a much-needed solution," said Greg Clark, Managing Partner, Crosspoint Capital Partners. "We were impressed with the company's capabilities at this year's RSAC Innovation Sandbox contest, and with Crosspoint Capital's investment in its team and technology, we are confident MIND will continue to deliver the industry's most cutting-edge DLP platform. It's time for an AI-led disruption to legacy DLP." "MIND is not just improving DLP, they are fundamentally transforming it," said Justin Somaini, Partner at YL Ventures, who led MIND's seed round and participated in this Series A. "This fundraise signals that the market is ready for a new generation of data protection built for the AI era. We are doubling down on MIND because we believe they have the vision, technology and team to redefine how enterprises safeguard their most sensitive data. This is a pivotal moment, and MIND is perfectly positioned to lead the future of DLP." For more information, visit About MINDMIND is on a mission to help organizations thrive in a digital world in the AI era by protecting their most sensitive data, mitigating risks and preserving brand reputation. MIND is the first-ever data security platform that puts data loss prevention (DLP) and insider risk management (IRM) programs on autopilot to deliver both data security posture and data loss prevention. We enable businesses to mind what really matters—their most sensitive data. Founded and led by cybersecurity leaders and industry veterans, MIND is based out of Seattle, WA. For more information, contact us at info@ Media Contact:Michelle KearneyHi-Touch PR443-857-9468kearney@ View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE MIND
Forbes
7 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
This $101 Million Startup's AI Exposes Fraudsters Disguised As Employees
North Korean spies have found ways into U.S. companies, tricking employers into thinking their legitimate workers, when they're trying to siphon off business' data. Everything seemed fine when one of Eran Barak's customers, a financial services business, hired a remote worker to do their Salesforce admin. In the interview, the man seemed capable of doing what should've been routine work, and he passed all the background checks. Two weeks into the job, though, Barak says his AI software, dubbed MIND, spotted the employee sending highly sensitive company data up to his personal cloud account. The person coming into the office turned out not to be the same person who'd been interviewed, Barak says. 'It was a completely different individual who had 'bought' the job from a professional fraudster.' With so many new risks to business' data, from accidentally employing a fraudster or losing data to North Korean spies with a similar modus operandi, or employees giving away company secrets to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, companies need new security tech to help them monitor and flag these risks. Barak, who cofounded Seattle-based cyber startup MIND in 2022, said his company's AI can prevent costly data leaks with an 'autopilot' that autonomously identifies sensitive data and helps IT teams secure it, claiming it can reduce false alerts about data leaks 'to nearly zero.' 'We want to push what we call a small language model.' On Wednesday, MIND announced a $30 million Series A round led by Paladin Capital Group and Crosspoint Capital Partners at a $101 million valuation. That follows a $10 million round in September last year after it came out of stealth. Barak says MIND's AI is far better than a human at determining the risk of a given piece of data, whether that's a batch of credit card numbers or meeting minutes, and then telling IT what layers of security are protecting them, if any. That means the AI won't leave as many 'blindspots' where sensitive data is left exposed, according to MIND's pitch. To put these insights into action, an AI agent sits on each employee's device and will detect and block data leakages either happening in the browser or via another app. 'We want to push what we call a small language model to the device itself, so we can really classify on the fly much more complex, sensitive data on the device,' Barak told Forbes. The MIND cofounders have a history in successful AI startups. Barak cofounded Hexadite, another security automation tool that was sold to Microsoft for a reported $100 million in 2017. Hod Bin Noon, MIND's VP of research and development, was a director at Dazz, which was acquired by cloud security giant Wiz for $450 million last year, with Wiz itself set to be acquired by Google for $32 billion. MIND CTO Itai Schwartz was a senior engineer at Torq, which makes AI agents focused on cybersecurity. Barak 'built one of the flagship security automation players,' said Paladin investor Gibb Witham, who led the round. He'd been on the hunt for an AI-native company to solve the problems modern AI was creating, Witham said, and the MIND team's deep cybersecurity automation experience was a major draw. Among MIND's chief competitors is another startup, CyberHaven, which hit a $1 billion valuation earlier this year on a recent $100 million raise. Both are relying on AI to do much of the work of the IT security engineer, while looking for leaks across an organization's networks. Not that Barak thinks that AI is yet good enough to be relied on to automate all security tasks. 'It won't completely replace us,' he adds. 'But I can tell you that the depth and precision of the classification that we are doing thanks to the AI, it's unreal.'
