The rise of AI has created something of a paradox for security professionals. On one hand, large language models and advances in machine learning mean that it’s never been easier to parse through petabytes of data and craft agents that can spot and correct potential vulnerabilities. On the other, the ability for bad actors to exploit those ballooning piles of data has grown in tandem. So which wins out?
New York-based Teleskope has raised a $25 million Series A led by M13 to help companies beef up their 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.
The idea came from Nammour’s work at Airbnb, where she was tasked with corralling the booking platform’s sprawling and highly sensitive data, from home addresses to medical information. As the company barreled forward, it was difficult to keep track of where everything lived, let alone ensuring that it was safeguarded.
Nammour’s team ended up building proprietary software that could find sensitive data, create privacy controls, and delete it, utilizing early versions of LLMs well before the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT created the global obsession around AI. After she authored a few blog posts about the project, other security teams and venture capitalists reached out to tell her they were frustrated by the available tools on the market, which included AWS Macie, BigID, and Varonis.
Realizing that only a small percentage of companies had the resources to build out what Airbnb had, she decided to start work on Teleskope, raising her pre-seed round in 2022 while still at Airbnb (though she didn’t start building the software). Some of her angel investors even came from the company’s security team.
Teleskope has 23 customers and has converted around 85% of pilots into paid customers, according to Nammour, and has grown 600% year-over-year with 29 employees, though the team is quickly growing. “We gave her a term sheet and then by the time we actually closed and sent her the check, she’d already added I think nine employees,” Alomar said. “She moves very fast.”
