Increasing data transparency and ensuring companies are compliant with governance policies, Reylance AI secured $32 million in a Series B investment round on October 10.
Thomvest Ventures led the funding round, followed by M12, Microsoft Ventures Fund, Cheyenne Ventures along with existing investors Unusual and Menlo Ventures.
“We wanted to tackle the underserved, overcomplicated space of data privacy and AI, where organizations struggled with compliance and customer trust waned,” Co-founder and CEO Abhi Sharma wrote in a blog announcing the latest funding for the data governance startup.
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With the vision of reimagining data governance, Relyance AI is a platform that scans an organization’s data which might include third-party applications, cloud environments, AI models, code repositories, and verifies if they’re in compliance with policies.
“Relyance enables organizations to monitor external vendor risks,” Sharma told TechCrunch, “while its data lineage feature tracks data flows across applications to identify potential risks proactively.”
Although competitors like OneTrust, Transcend, DataGrail, and Securiti AI exist, Relyance appears to be holding its own. The data governance startup has accumulated a star-studded customer base including Coinbase, Snowflake, MyFitnessPal, and Plaid, and has seen a 30% increase in clientele in the first half of 2024.
The latest round of funding raised Reylance AI’s total capital to $59 million. The new funds will go to expanding the startup’s engineering team and increasing the go-to-market capacity to support the product development and growth momentum.
Sharma, who received his bachelor’s degree from MIT and a master’s from Carnegie Mellon University, is primarily a software developer. Previously, he was a platform engineer at AppDynamics before co-founding FogHorn, an edge AI platform that Johnson Controls acquired in 2022.
Co-founder Leila Golchehreh, a University of Berkeley alum, is an attorney by trade and has previously served as senior counsel at Workday and autonomous car startup Cruise.
Together, Sharma and Golchehreh founded Reylance AI in 2020 to address the challenges data security practices around AI posed.