This raise isn’t about us.
It’s about the leaders, defenders, and unsung heroes who inspired us to build Matters.AI. Let me tell you about one of my heroes: Mr. Tukaram Omble.
He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t heavily armed. He was a Mumbai police constable, a father of five, and a man of quiet courage. On the night of 26/11, when heavily armed terrorists attacked Mumbai and tried to escape, Tukaram didn’t step back. Armed with nothing but a simple baton, he ran toward gunfire to protect his city. He took over 20 bullets, but held onto the terrorist’s rifle long enough for his team to capture him alive, ending the siege. He died that night. But his courage saved hundreds. He didn’t have the best weapon. He had something stronger conviction. That story became the moral compass for how we built this company.
Because today, our world has a new kind of battlefield the digital one. And there are new kinds of heroes the CISOs, engineers, and analysts who stay awake so others can sleep.
They protect hospitals from shutting down, banks from collapsing, and nations from chaos with no spotlight, no medals, no applause. They face attacks every day. When something breaks, they don’t panic, they respond. When the board questions them, they stand alone. They miss birthdays, graduations, and family dinners, not for glory, but because protecting trust matters more.
They aren’t armed with guns or armor, they have dashboards, alerts, and an impossible mission: defend the reputation of their companies in real time. They fight fatigue, false positives, and budget battles, but still show up with the same courage Tukaram had that night.
So when people ask me what this raise is about, I tell them this:
It’s not about valuation. It’s about validation, for the unseen heroes who protect the digital world.
That’s why we built Matters.AI. to be the AI Security Engineer who never sleeps, a digital companion for the ones who never stop defending.
Built for the Defenders Who Never Stop
Celebrating the Quiet Courage of CISOs and Security Engineers
The Problem
What CISOs Whisper but Never Admit Publicly
Every CISO we meet eventually says the same thing:
I can’t even tell you where my sensitive data is right now.
That’s not incompetence, that’s the state of modern enterprise. Data now lives in clouds, SaaS, endpoints, emails, and AI tools that replicate it in seconds. It moves faster than any security stack built before 2020 can comprehend. Security leaders aren’t blind because they don’t care they’re blind because their tools were built for a world that no longer exists.
Visibility
Over 90% of sensitive data in enterprises is completely invisible to security teams. DLPs see movement but not meaning. DSPMs map storage but not exposure. And what you can’t see, you can’t protect.
Detection
Security teams chase 1,000+ alerts a day, yet 90% of real data threats go undetected.
Legacy tools trigger on keywords, not context, drowning engineers in false positives.
Investigation & Response
In a Every incident, 80% of time is wasted pulling logs and mapping access. Only 20% goes toward understanding the actual threat, while data keep getting misused.
Fragmentation
An average enterprise runs 15+ tools, DSPM for visibility, DLP for control, XDR for detection, CASB for SaaS, UEBA for behavior, each solves one slice; none connect the story.
The paradox: More tools → less visibility. More alerts → less understanding.
The Gap
CISOs don’t need another dashboard. They need one intelligent system that sees, understands, and acts, across Cloud, SaaS, Endpoint, Identity, OnPrem and GenAI. The gap is simple but deadly: visibility without understanding. Every tool shows where the data is, none explains why it’s moving or who’s misusing it.
In a world where AI fragments data into a thousand invisible pieces, prompts, screenshots, embeddings, summaries, blindness is no longer a risk; it’s an inevitability. One wrong click can replicate sensitive data across hundreds of systems in seconds. That’s why this moment MATTERS.
Matters.AI bridges that gap, turning fragmented visibility into unified, intelligent protection before visibility becomes vulnerability.
The Moment It All Began
It started when a Fortune 500 CISO asked me:
Keshav, where is our most sensitive data right now?
And I couldn’t answer. Not because I lacked experience, after leading AI and security programs at VMware, Intuit, and Observe.AI, I had access to every “modern” tool on the market. But none could answer that question. That silence became an obsession, the moment I realized that if even the best teams couldn’t see or understand their data, something fundamental was broken.
Matters.AI was born not as another product, but as an AI Security Engineer, built to think like a human, reason like a CISO, and act like the best analyst you ever hired.
The Hacker and the Practitioner
Before I became a founder, I was both a hacker and a security practitioner. Breaking systems taught me curiosity. Defending them taught me empathy. That duality revealed one truth:
Breaches don’t happen because systems fail, they happen because context is missing.
Machines detect anomalies. Humans detect intent. I built Matters.AI to close that gap, to make machines reason like humans. To build a system that sees like a hacker and thinks like a security engineer.
The Insight
Security Isn’t a Tool Problem. It’s an Intelligence Problem.
Everyone else builds control.
We built understanding.
If you can understand:
- what your data means,
- who is using it, and
- why it’s being accessed,
then you can protect it intelligently; without friction.
That’s the foundation of Matters.AI: Security that thinks like an engineer, not a rule engine.
Matters.AI : Your AI Security Engineer
Your AI Security Engineer
The Product
The First AI Security Engineer
Matters.AI unifies DSPM, DDR, Insider Risk, and Dynamic DLP into one AI-driven layer that sees, understands, and acts.
Core Innovations
- LLM-Based Semantic Classifier – Understands meaning, not patterns. Classifies PII, PCI, PHI, and business data across Cloud, SaaS, and Endpoints.
- Data Lineage Graph – Maps how data moves and transforms across users, systems, and applications.
- eBPF Endpoint Sensor – Anchors telemetry at the source; classifies locally and transmits metadata securely.
- AI Threat Detection Engine – Correlates activity across Identity, Endpoint, and Network Logs to detect Insider Misuse and Exfiltration.
- Security Copilot – Natural language investigation: “Show me who accessed customer data outside office hours.”
The Competitive Landscape
When DSPM Stopped, We Started
Just like CSPM evolved into CNAPP, pure-play DSPM is now evolving; from visibility to protection. CSPM made posture easy to find, but posture didn’t stop breaches. The market evolved into CNAPP; uniting posture, runtime, and identity to deliver prevention.
DSPM is on the same path: Discovery and classification at rest are necessary but insufficient, especially as AI fragments data into snippets, embeddings, and prompts that evade label-based controls.
Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Security echoes this shift:
By 2026, more than 60% of organizations will converge DSPM, DLP, and Insider Risk into unified data protection platforms; a move driven by AI data sprawl and context loss.
That’s exactly what we built Matters.AI to do.
Where others stop at maps, we provide meaning.
| Capability | FirstGen DSPM | Legacy DLP | Matters.AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | Discovery | Control | Understanding & prevention |
| Surface | Cloud only | Endpoint/email | Unified: Endpoint, SaaS, Cloud, AI |
| Method | Tags & labels | Regex & rules | Lineage + semantic reasoning |
| AI Readiness | Low | Low | Built for AI-native fragment flow |
| Outcome | Reports | Alerts | Real-time action & prevention |
Growth 300% in 12 months
The Voice of Our Customers, From Fortune 500, to Fast Growing Business
The Vision
Predict. Prevent. Protect What Matters
We’re building the Time Machine for enterprise data protection. A platform that understands meaning, predicts misuse, and prevents breaches before they happen.
Gartner predicts that by 2027,
Data security will shift from reactive detection to proactive reasoning; driven by AI systems that contextualize behavior and intent.
By 2026, Matters will be the control plane for enterprise data trust; replacing dashboards with reasoning.
Our vision:
To make data protection intelligent, invisible, and inevitable.
The Mission
Protect What Matters
For a mother, her child matters.
For a founder, their vision matters.
For an enterprise, its reputation matters.
For humanity, data matters.
We built Matters.AI for the ones who stay awake so others can sleep; the CISOs, the engineers, the defenders. Because everything that matters deserves protection.
The Team
Builders Behind the Brain
We didn’t hire employees. We built a founding crew.
Each joined because they believed this problem was too important to ignore.
He joined because, in his words,
He joined after seeing how fast CISOs connected with our demo.
He joined to build what he calls
The Round
Scaling the Mission
We’ve raised $6.25M Seed, led by Kalaari Capital, Endiya Partners, Better Capital, and Carya Ventures, with participation from top security angels.
Next 18 Months
- Expand U.S. GTM, 5x ARR.
- Advance predictive exfiltration and insider-risk models,
- Cement Matters.AI as the category-defining AI Security Engineer, under DSPM.
Investor and Leadership Statements
Why Matters
This isn’t a cybersecurity story. It’s a story about trust, and the humans who protect it. We named it Matters.AI because it reminds us what’s at stake; the dreams, reputations, and relationships behind every byte. We’re not building software. We’re building a security engineer who never sleeps. Because everything that matters deserves to be protected.
That’s why Matters.AI exists.