Osano, a data privacy management platform, nabs $25M

Osano, an Austin, Texas-based startup developing a platform to help companies manage their data privacy, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Baird Capital with First Ascent Ventures, Jump Capital, LiveOak, NextCoast and TDF.

In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Arlo Gilbert said that the cash will be put toward expanding Osano's engineering, product development and sales departments, investing more in R&D and building a channel program.

"All of this will help serve Osano’s goals of expanding its product suite, continuing to service its customers’ needs and maintaining its high customer service satisfaction," Gilbert told me via email. "With this funding, Osano will scale the team to deliver on the company’s mission and goal of simplifying privacy compliance for its customers as they continue to grow in their privacy program maturity -- and becoming the leading data privacy platform."

In light of high-profile hacks and data breaches, as well as regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, privacy awareness and investment continues to grow among organizations. The risk's certainly growing. Companies are now spending an average of $11.45 million per year in remediation costs related to insider data breaches, per Proofpoint. And among organizations who must comply with the GDPR, 38% reported a breach in 2019 -- compared to just 16% in 2018.

It's not surprising, then, that 40% of organizations plan to invest in additional security service spending, according to a 2020 Gartner survey. It'll likely be well worth it. In its Data Privacy Benchmark study, Cisco found that more than 40% of organizations are seeing benefits at least twice that of their privacy spend.

Osano aims to be companies' go-to solution for privacy management.

Gilbert co-founded Osano in 2018 with Scott Hertel, inspired by Gilbert's observation that organizations were misunderstanding data privacy. From inception, Osano offered products dedicated to data privacy, but later grew into a platform and suite of products to build, automate and scale their privacy programs.