Location-independent working is now normalised for enterprises in every industry and continent, the initial existential struggles of collaborating effectively are moving to more strategic conversations — ensuring that all communication and information sharing takes place in a secure and sustainable way, compliant with regulatory and legal frameworks. Consumers and businesses are continuing to enjoy the efficiencies, convenience, and socially-safe benefits that online interactions offer, but one-to-one interactions, often from a domestic location, can create a false sense of both privacy and security — which must be met with the right technology to supervise and protect the interaction.
The new raise by Theta Lake — dual winner of Best Compliance Product and Best Security Product in UC Today’s UC Awards 2020, and a market leader in collaboration and compliance solutions for Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, Zoom and more — sees them secure $12.7 million in Series A funding through investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cisco, and a slew of angel investors, bringing their total funding to $20 million.
“Cisco has a longstanding commitment to security and privacy by design, and we are excited to invest in Theta Lake because compliance and security for collaboration platforms is more important than ever,” said Abhay Kulkarni, Vice President and General Manager for Cisco Webex Meetings and Teams. “After seeing the integration in action, it was an easy decision for us to want to help Theta Lake grow and solve real customer problems.”
With the global growth for collaboration software anticipated by Research and Markets to expand from $8.9 billion in 2019 to approximately $23 billion in 2020, ensuring that employees are safely, securely, and compliantly using these rich information sharing platforms, such as video conferencing and collaboration chat, has never been more important. Theta Lake is empowering enterprises to manage compliance, data exposure, security, and acceptable use risks in what is shared, shown, spoken, and typed during collaboration sessions.
Expanding compliance and supervision to new areas
The new financing for Theta Lake, which follows seed funding in 2018, will enable them to scale up fast to meet this growing market need.
We spoke to Devin Redmond, CEO and Co-Founder of Theta Lake (pictured, above), who explained that the “growing demand for our innovative compliance and security solutions can be demonstrated by our customers across 4 countries as well as the rapidly growing engagements across Financial Services, Healthcare, Education, and broader Enterprise. This growing demand is a large part of why leading investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Cisco Investments chose to join our Series A funding round and invest in our relevant, fast-growing company.
“Theta Lake will invest in further advancing our patented and award-winning platform, while also increasing its service capabilities and enhancing its renowned user experience and design interface. It will also be used to scale our business and expand into new geographic markets in order to meet the high demand around the globe for security and compliance solutions that address the unique risks associated with today’s modern video conferencing and collaboration platforms.”
With so many enterprises using a diverse range of UC tools to address their needs, building Theta Lake into a service which addresses all possible vectors of data loss is the aim, to provide a comprehensive, yet accessible, service to their customers. As Redmond continued, “we want to offer a tool that provides a single-pane-of-glass, which provides the ability to capture all unified communication and collaboration communications and apply compliance and increased visibility uniformly across all those different communication channels that are inside of their environments.”
A unified future to security
Following the explosion of new solutions which accompanied the remote working revolution this year, consolidation and security are now the focus, for organisations looking at a distributed long-term operation. As Rob Scott, UC Today Founder and Publisher, said, “In this ever-evolving multi-channel world of communication and collaboration, security and compliance continues to be at the centre of every conversation. The appetite for Theta Lake’s AI-powered technology only reinforces this growing demand.”
This funding enables Theta Lake to continue investing in their security and compliance capabilities and partnerships across leading collaboration platforms. “At Zoom, we have seen the demand for video interactions accelerate how people and companies communicate. We are committed to security and compliance, and the integrations to Zoom by Theta Lake are yet another example,” said Paul Magnaghi, ISV World Wide Leader at Zoom.
“Theta Lake is an innovator for modern video and unified communications with 4 unique and compelling security and compliance integrations with Zoom. We are excited to see Theta Lake and our partnership grow as a result of their recent funding”
So as UC continues to power the global distributed B2B and B2C conversation, integrated supervision and compliance tools will enable this to happen safely and effectively — protecting businesses and their customers, wherever and however they are connecting.
