Strengthening the Lakehouse Governance Ecosystem: Databricks Ventures Invests in Immuta

Databricks Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Immuta's Series E funding round, marking the latest step in our six-year partnership with the industry-leading data security platform.

Our Vision

The Databricks Lakehouse is the best place for enterprises to develop data and AI applications together, and to build large language models (LLMs). Our lakehouse vision is centered around the unification of these workloads on one platform. At the foundation of our lakehouse vision lies Unity Catalog, the data governance layer for all data and AI workloads.

Unity Catalog provides the foundational capabilities needed to govern data managed in Databricks and we’ve made significant investments to enhance its capabilities after first announcing it last year. More recently, we announced our intent to acquire Okera, which will help us continue to improve the built-in governance capabilities of Databricks. Additionally, we are continuing to develop our broad ecosystem of technology partners and will prioritize integrations with leading data security platforms like Immuta.

Success with Immuta

Our investment in Immuta is based on our shared success delivering on some of the largest and most complex cloud data projects across almost every industry. Immuta is a preferred data security partner for The Global 2000 and public sector customers and we have over 50 joint customers relying on Databricks and Immuta for their enterprise-grade, cross-platform data security needs.

Together, we're helping organizations like ADP and J.B. Hunt secure their most sensitive data assets while unleashing the full value for a wide variety of use cases. According to Jack Berkowitz, the Chief Data Officer at ADP, “As a company with over a million clients doing payroll for millions of people, ADP processes a large amount of data. Databricks helps us to manage that data and Immuta plays an important role in administering security and access control. As we look to innovate with new products and implement a multi-cloud strategy, we must treat the data properly – it must be governed.”

Another joint customer, J.B. Hunt, increased permitted use cases for cloud analytics by 100% with Immuta and Databricks. According to Tina Headrick, the Senior Manager of Data Governance and Privacy at J.B. Hunt: “Before Immuta, we could not make our data widely available to the users due to security concerns. Immuta has allowed us to open up the data to a wide variety of users.”

These successes don’t come without great technology. The Immuta Data Security Platform is a mature, enterprise-grade platform that these companies rely on to secure their most sensitive data assets. It provides the full suite of capabilities that most organizations need to secure their data, including sensitive data discovery, security and access control, and data usage monitoring.

Immuta and Unity Catalog

Working directly with the Databricks engineering team, Immuta has developed a deep native integration with Unity Catalog. This enables us to deliver a seamless experience in which Immuta orchestrates and enforces granular data policies without impacting performance. The user experience does not change. Users still query their data directly in Databricks. Immuta is never in the data path. Data and security teams can collaborate and get full transparency into the policies protecting the data.

Immuta offers more than just managing data policies, however. It also has advanced capabilities to discover, tag, and classify data. Data classifications are dynamic and stay in sync with any schema changes. Immuta also recently introduced Immuta Detect, a new capability to monitor data usage. By providing a proactive way to detect and assess risk, Immuta can help uncover insider threats as they happen.

With these capabilities, Immuta helps organizations simplify operations, improve data security, and unlock more value from their data.

What’s Next

Through our investment in Immuta, we are strengthening our close partnership and aligning our roadmaps and joint go-to-market initiatives. Databricks and Immuta will work together to further integrate Immuta with Unity Catalog, offering our customers even more powerful capabilities to govern and secure their Databricks Lakehouse and extend security controls across all of their data platforms. We’re excited to continue partnering together and look forward to what’s next.