Why We Invested in Teleskope

Data security is a burning problem in the AI age

There is a simple formula for seed investors: big market + strong tails winds + great founder = good investment. You don't know how these factors will play out before an investment, but sometimes they all get better than you had predicted. This is the case with Teleskope. We see no founder who grows as fast as Lizzy. The market she is in could not have better tailwinds. Lizzy started Teleskope to bring to market the data security solution she built while at Airbnb. We all believed that data would become more valuable over time, but then came the latest AI wave and our assumptions exploded. We're thrilled to share that Lizzy and team have raised a $25M Series A to go and tackle what is sure to be one of the most essential categories for the enterprise in the age of AI.

For a long time, data security has been a problem for security teams. Data lives everywhere, spanning SaaS applications, on-prem systems, and cloud resources. This means that data is hard to wrangle, and as a result, organizations risk sensitive data ending up in the hands of the wrong people.

This is not a new problem, but AI has accelerated the severity of it by 100x. Companies today see their data as a core asset more than ever before. They want to build differentiated products leveraging their data, make their enterprise tools more usable by enabling AI search, and fine-tune models for AI use cases using domain- and company-specific data. As companies rush to adopt AI, tools and agents like Microsoft Copilot can now surface sensitive information in seconds—far faster than any human search ever could or any attacker could extract manually—making existing risks of data exposure and breaches much easier to realize. Many companies and security teams recognize this risk and are holding back on AI adoption until they can clean up and secure their data.

This is where Teleskope comes in. Teleskope has built the category-leading agentic data security platform that goes beyond visibility and alerts to help teams actually fix data security issues. It enables CISOs and engineers to act on real risks through agents that learn the company’s policies and context, and through a natural-language workflow builder powered by small language models (SLMs) that drives remediation in milliseconds.

Imagine an internal rule that simply says “whenever PII is shared in Slack, delete it” and implements that rule in real-time. This is what Teleskope enables, across all types of data and applications. This kind of work would typically be impossible for engineers to do on their own, and take hours with existing tools sifting through alerts and doing manual remediations. Teleskope has proven to be a game changer, providing a jaw dropping customer experience to its users.

Teleskope was founded by Lizzy Nammour, who experienced the problem firsthand at Airbnb. She was tasked with getting Airbnb’s internal data GDPR-compliant and IPO-ready, and could not find anything on the market that would help find and remediate the problems. She founded Teleskope out of her own frustrations, and has done a miraculous job scaling the business quickly, delighting customers, and building a stellar team.

Why We Invested

Teleskope is off to the races, with customers like Ramp, Notion and Alloy. One of the most amazing testaments of Teleskope’s impact is the way its customers talk about the product and team. The customer love is palpable, and in our careers we have only come across such enthusiasm from users a handful of times. We’re excited for this fresh round of capital to enable the business to continue accelerating.

The progress of the company so far is exciting, but we are most looking forward to seeing where the business goes. In an AI age, so much manual, wasteful work will be automated. In security, we believe many automation opportunities exist, and data security is a great example. Data security engineers spend much of their time toiling away on manual scripts to solve data vulnerabilities and prevent exploits. In the future, this process needs to be augmented with AI, and Teleskope is positioned to be the agentic data security engineer.

We are thrilled to be collaborating with our friends at M13 and Lerer, along with many fantastic security leaders who are personally investing in this round. Congratulations to Lizzy and team Teleskope!