Investing in Teleskope and a New Data Future

Data inside the enterprise is a mess, and too much is exposed. The status quo is dangerous and overwhelming. Today, we’re excited to announce one of our most recent investments, Teleskope, which is solving this problem.

Teleskope is a data security startup that helps engineers protect their companies’ most valuable and vulnerable assets. We’re proud to have recently led their seed round, bringing their total funding to $8M.

To understand Teleskope, consider the complexity of enterprise data. Most companies will use a cloud provider as the first storage layer, dumping source data into something like S3. From there, certain data will be stored in a transactional database, typically capturing sensitive information like email addresses, dates of birth, private health information, confidential messages, and more.

Some of that data might flow into data lakes or other data stores for even more specific jobs, merging with data coming from third-party SaaS apps. Companies onboard new customers, employees, microservices, functionality, geographies, and more – all of which complicates their data environments.

The end result is data sprawl, confusion, waste, and vulnerabilities. Existing data security solutions attempt to deal with this mess, but there are many issues. False positives are still too pervasive, reducing trust in tools. Dashboards are the primary way information is consumed, which is helpful for CISOs but doesn’t bridge the gap to engineers remediating the problems. The engineering workflow is still very manual or requires writing one-off scripts to delete or classify data. The list goes on.

The acuity of this pain is getting higher because of AI and regulatory change. In an AI age, companies are pushing to use more of their data in AI models, decreasing margin for error in data quality. Additionally, regulatory change in states like California (with more to come) gives consumers the ability to request personal data deletion, and complying with those requests is a huge pain for companies.

Teleskope is the solution to these problems, enabling engineers at organizations to classify, redact, and delete data automatically, without the need for annoying script-writing. If you need to comply with consumer data privacy and protection requirements but currently waste engineering hours on manual fixes, Teleskope is the right platform for you. If you want to prep your data for analytics or AI use cases but need to make sure the data is compliant and clean, Teleskope is the right platform for you. And if you’re a scaling company with lots of data management challenges but a slim security team, Teleskope is the right platform for you.

More compelling than the problem or existing solution, however, is the team. Lizzy Nammour and Julie Trias are both immigrants with a passion for building. Julie immigrated at a young age from the Philippines to Texas, learned how to code as a kid, joined the military, and then began her civilian career at tech companies as an early engineer. Lizzy immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon before studying engineering at Penn. The two of them met at Airbnb, where they built a version of this solution internally. Fast forward a couple of years, and Lizzy and Julie are solving this same problem more broadly, for a large set of customers facing similar types of problems to the ones at Airbnb.

This experience has given Lizzy and Julie firsthand knowledge of the problem they are solving, and they possess an intimacy and empathy with customers that we have rarely seen from founders. When you get them on a call with a prospective customer, they are two steps ahead – they see customer problems perhaps even before customers see them, and they feel more like a colleague problem solving alongside a security leader than a vendor trying to sell into them.

If there is one macro theme we believe is worth betting on – spanning not just a few years but decades – it is that data will become more pervasive and more useful, and companies that utilize data optimally and securely will separate themselves from competitors. Investing in infrastructure tooling at Primary, we have a unique opportunity to bet on this trend, and we believe Teleskope is primed to accelerate the usefulness, compliance, and security of data for many organizations in the years to come.

If these problems resonate, feel free to get in touch and we’ll connect you to the Teleskope team.