New York-based cybersecurity startup, Teleskope, has successfully raised $2.2 million in a Pre-Seed funding round. This round was led by Lerer Hippeau. The funds raised are slated to be used to expand business operations and reach.
Teleskope, co-founded in 2022 by ex-Airbnb security engineers Elizabeth Nammour and Julie Trias, has positioned itself as a game-changer in the data security sector. The startup is built upon the promise of facilitating organizations in achieving data security, privacy, and compliance through automation, consequently reducing the manual and operational load on security teams.
Enhanced Data Security Through Advanced AI
Teleskope’s groundbreaking approach incorporates the use of large language models (LLM) for data classification. These AI models, continuously fine-tuned for speed and cost, possess the capability to identify data subjects, for instance, customers and employees, and can differentiate between types of customers, such as doctors and patients.
The unique AI-driven solution can swiftly monitor cloud data stores and third-party vendors, providing a comprehensive inventory of assets – even hidden ones – and pinpointing their security and compliance risks. Its advanced classification engine is designed to adapt to each unique data store, identifying sensitive data and providing actionable context about who the data concerns. The system learns from each unique customer implementation to enhance accuracy continually.
Addressing the Problem of False Positives
Unlike traditional Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) approaches, which often result in alert fatigue due to high false positives, Teleskope’s AI-integrated solution promises greater accuracy and actionable insights. This transformative method reduces the manual and operation burden on security, data, and engineering teams, providing them with valuable time to focus on actual threats.
According to Fastly Research and Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a whopping 75% of organizations spend as much time, or more, on false positives than actual attacks. Teleskope’s AI-based solution, therefore, comes as a significant relief, helping organizations streamline their security operations while mitigating risk.
Empowering Developers and Integrating Workflows
Teleskope has been designed to integrate easily with existing workflows and developer pipelines. It enables engineers to automate security right at the source, thus saving them valuable time and reducing risk. It provides engineers with a powerful tool to detect and remediate security vulnerabilities before they enter production by enforcing protection policies at each stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Relevance in Today’s World
Teleskope’s services are particularly pertinent in an era where privacy incidents and data breaches are surging, accompanied by hefty fines for improper handling of data. With the company’s advanced contextual analysis, organizations can discern whether data – such as an address – is considered personally identifiable information (PII), depending on its association with a customer’s home address, a public landmark, or a business address.
Furthermore, Teleskope supports structured and unstructured data stores across popular cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Snowflake, and even third-party SaaS. Its system can identify over 100 data types, including personal, payment, healthcare, and sensitive data.
A Step Towards Streamlined Compliance and Security
Teleskope can automatically enforce compliance requirements, remediate security vulnerabilities directly at the source, or enable developers to implement custom security or privacy protocols through open APIs. As per the company, its solution is capable of scaling to petabytes of data with predictable and cost-effective pricing.
According to Nick Cobb, the former Uber senior infrastructure manager and now VP of Engineering and Product at Kyte, “Teleskope has been a game-changer for us in streamlining our compliance and security processes… By integrating Teleskope’s findings into our existing workflows through APIs, our engineers were able to automate compliance tasks, saving them valuable hours of operational overhead…”
Wrapping Up
With its unique approach, fresh perspective, and strategic use of AI for best-in-class contextual classification, Teleskope is well-positioned to revolutionize the data security sector. Its promise of automating data security and privacy while simultaneously reducing risks and operational overhead could very well make it a leader in cybersecurity solutions.