The rise of AI has created something of a paradox for security professionals. On one hand, large language models and advances in machine learning mean that it’s never been easier to parse through petabytes of data and craft agents that can spot and correct potential vulnerabilities. On the other, the ability for bad actors to exploit those ballooning piles of data has grown in tandem. So which wins out?
New York-based Teleskope has raised a $25 million Series A led by M13 to help companies beef up their security amid the cyber-arms race. Primary Venture Partners and Lerer Hippeau, which invested in previous rounds, also participated, bringing Teleskope’s total funding to $32.2 million.
Founded by Elizabeth Nammour, a former security engineer at Airbnb, Teleskope takes a unique approach of using smaller large language models fine-tuned on specific problems such as detecting sensitive information within code files, rather than funneling everything into one larger model, which Nammour says allows her company to function more nimbly than competitors. “By segregating it into smaller problem sets, we are more accurate, but also faster,” she told me.
The idea came from Nammour’s work at Airbnb, where she was tasked with corralling the booking platform’s sprawling and highly sensitive data, from home addresses to medical information. As the company barreled forward, it was difficult to keep track of where everything lived, let alone ensuring that it was safeguarded.
Nammour’s team ended up building proprietary software that could find sensitive data, create privacy controls, and delete it, utilizing early versions of LLMs well before the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT created the global obsession around AI. After she authored a few blog posts about the project, other security teams and venture capitalists reached out to tell her they were frustrated by the available tools on the market, which included AWS Macie, BigID, and Varonis.
Realizing that only a small percentage of companies had the resources to build out what Airbnb had, she decided to start work on Teleskope, raising her pre-seed round in 2022 while still at Airbnb (though she didn’t start building the software). Some of her angel investors even came from the company’s security team.
According to Karl Alomar, managing partner at M13, Teleskope’s breakthrough comes from its ability to not only provide companies with visibility on where their sensitive data lives, but also help remediate the issue. That’s where Teleskope’s agentic approach comes in. Security officers can upload their policies, such as what to do with personally identifiable information on Slack or Google Drive, and then Teleskope will not only find where it’s happening, but also delete it. “The solution Lizzy went after was if we’re going to give you all this information, let’s also give you the ability to solve it,” Alomar said. “That totally changes the paradigm of this category.”
Teleskope has 23 customers and has converted around 85% of pilots into paid customers, according to Nammour, and has grown 600% year-over-year with 29 employees, though the team is quickly growing. “We gave her a term sheet and then by the time we actually closed and sent her the check, she’d already added I think nine employees,” Alomar said. “She moves very fast.”
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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