BlueTalon provides a policy engine that delivers dynamic user access controls to data across Hadoop, Spark, and SQL-based data platforms, along with an audit engine that gives a full audit trail at user and data detail levels required for compliance. Led by CEO Eric Tilenius and based in Redwood City, Calif., the company focuses on data-centric security for big data and new data initiatives. BlueTalon raised over $16M in a Series A financing and has raised over $25M in funding to date. In conjunction with the funding, Matthew Kinsella, Managing Director at Maverick Ventures, joined BlueTalon’s board of directors. The company intends to use the funds for continued expansion of its development and sales teams. The product and go-to-market appear centered on enabling compliant, auditable access controls across modern data platforms. BlueTalon’s core product is the BlueTalon Policy Engine, which enforces fine-grained, data-centric access policies for Hadoop with real-time authorization at the row, column and cell level for each query. The Policy Engine integrates with existing enterprise infrastructures and multiple enforcement points including Hive, Impala, JDBC and ODBC, with HDFS enforcement planned for release at the end of Q2. It offers role- and purpose-based provisioning via a graphical user interface, on-the-fly masking of sensitive data, and full auditing of successful and denied access to support compliance and security. The company positions the product for regulated industries such as finance and healthcare to enable enterprise-scale Hadoop adoption. BlueTalon was selected for the Strata + Hadoop World Startup Showcase and is exhibiting at the conference. Financially, BlueTalon announced $5 million in follow-on venture capital funding and is backed by investors including Data Collective and Signia Venture Partners. BlueTalon offers a virtual database delivered via a SaaS model that catalogs data from contributing databases but contains no data itself. The product maintains virtual connections to back-end databases to enable on-the-fly analysis without months-long ETL processes. BlueTalon positions this capability as a way to combine internal and external data sources, including competitors' data, while avoiding proprietary data-warehousing and large ETL projects. The company says virtual databases can be up and running in weeks and at a fraction of the cost of traditional ETL, and it emphasizes security benefits. BlueTalon has paying customers including United Healthcare and Eli Lilly. The company was founded in July 2013 by Pratik Verma, a Stanford PhD and veteran data scientist.

Total raised

$23M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Aug 2016