Database monitoring platform startup JSonar today announced it raised $ 50 million, the bulk of which it plans to put toward R&D and go-to-market efforts. Notably, it’s the company’s first-ever round of institutional funding as JSonar’s customer base eclipses 5 out of the world’s 10 largest banks.
Database monitoring is a critical part of most apps’ maintenance. Finding issues in time can help apps remain healthy and accessible, not to mention performant. But the adoption of cloud-based and dynamic, modern data systems make this challenging; legacy data activity monitoring and logging solutions sometimes fail to transform data into actionable insights.
JSonar claims its SonarW and SonarG analytics solutions perform better because they’re automated and AI-powered. The models underpinning them transform petabytes of raw database activity data into security recommendations, with capabilities that go beyond detection and deliver preventative controls. They helpfully funnel these controls and recommendations into existing workflows, and into third-party DevOps services and platforms via prebuilt integrations.
Using SonarW and SonarG, the latter of which is designed for IBM Guardium, users can develop custom analytical algorithms atop large-scale databases and automate reporting and governance processes. According to JSonar, this saves companies months they’d otherwise spend developing proprietary platforms.
Beyond SonarW, JSonar offers Data-Centric Audit and Protection (DCAP) Central, a product that taps the company’s SonarC2 analytics engine to create data lakes capturing, retaining, and facilitating database management. Then there’s DBSec2.0, a fully managed SonarG offering that ingests database audit data and lets customers interact with it directly for security and compliance insights.
The JSonar suite supports virtually any database system on any cloud including infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and database-as-a-service setups. This includes out-of-the-box support for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, MongoDB, Cassandra, Hadoop, Teradata, and more than 60 others.
The database security and monitoring market is anticipated to be worth $ 7.01 billion by 2022, Markets and Markets reports, and JSonar is far from the only startup attempting to corner it. Among others, there’s SolarWinds, which has been offering management and optimization tools for open systems and databases for years, and Netdata, which makes an open source database monitoring tool.
But JSonar founder and CTO Ron Bennatan, former cofounder of Guardium Database Activity (which IBM acquired in November 2009), believes his company’s reliance on automation sets it apart from the rest. “The rapidly shifting enterprise landscape, including cloud adoption, an explosion of database platforms, the pressing need for data security beyond only compliance, and years of frustration over runaway costs, has created a huge opportunity for us to rapidly expand,” he told VentureBeat via email. “Traditional database security solutions have proven to be too costly to be used broadly and provide little beyond a checkbox; the modern data landscape demands a new approach.”
Goldman Sachs led the investment in JSonar. As a part of the transaction, Goldman Sachs managing director David Campbell will join the startup’s board of directors.
