The rise of artificial intelligence poses something of a paradox for security professionals. On the one hand, advances in large language models and machine learning mean it has never been easier to parse petabytes of data and craft agents that can find and correct potential vulnerabilities. On the other hand, bad actors are increasingly able to exploit this ever-expanding amount of data. So which one wins?
New York-based Teleskope raised $25 million in Series A funding led by M13 to help enterprises bolster 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.
Created by former security engineer Elizabeth Nammour AirbnbTeleskope takes a unique approach of using smaller, large language models that are fine-tuned for specific problems, such as detecting sensitive information in code files, rather than lumping everything into one larger model, which Nammour said allows her company to operate more nimbly than its competitors. “By breaking it into smaller problem sets, we’ll be more accurate, but also faster,” she told me.
The idea came from Nammour’s job at Airbnb, where she was tasked with collecting the booking platform’s vast and highly sensitive data, from home addresses to medical information. As a company grows rapidly, it can be difficult to keep track of where everything is stored, let alone make sure it’s protected.
Long before the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a global obsession with artificial intelligence, Nammour’s team leveraged an early version of the LLM to build proprietary software that could find sensitive data, create privacy controls and delete it. After she wrote several blog posts about the project, other security teams and venture capitalists told her they were frustrated with the tools available on the market, including AWS Macie, BigID, and Varonis.
After realizing that only a handful of companies had the resources to develop Airbnb’s product, she decided to start developing Teleskope, raising pre-seed funding in 2022 while still at Airbnb (although she didn’t start developing the software). Some of her angel investors even come from the company’s security team.
Karl Alomar, managing partner at M13, said Teleskope’s breakthrough lies in its ability to not only provide companies with visibility into where sensitive data resides, but also its ability to help solve problems. This is where Teleskope’s proxy approach comes in. Security officers can upload their policies, such as how to handle Slack or Google drive, and Teleskope will not only find where it happened, but also delete it. “The solution Lizzy is looking for is if we’re going to give you all this information, we’re also going to give you the ability to solve the problem,” Alomar said. “This completely changes the paradigm for this category.”
Teleskope has 23 customers, has converted about 85% of its pilots into paying customers, and has grown 600% year over year to 29 employees, but the team is still growing rapidly, according to Nammour. “We gave her a term sheet, and then by the time we actually closed and sent her the check, I think she had added nine employees,” Alomar said. “She moves very quickly.”
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
e-mail: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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