Privacy management software company OneTrust has closed a $210 million round of Series B funding led by Coatue and Insight Partners. The company estimates it is now valued at $2.7 billion. 

OneTrust Vice President of Products Blake Brannon said while the latest round of funding highlights the company's growth, it is also an example of the privacy industry's continued upward trajectory. "It’s just a great testament to the importance of this market and to everyone involved," Brannon said. "We are really excited about how this will help accelerate things from a technology-platform standpoint, as well."

The news comes just seven months after it landed $200 million in Series A funding, which, at the time, placed its valuation at $1.3 billion. With OneTrust now valued at $2.7 billion, privacy has a vendor that can stand next to, and even surpass, the valuation of companies in the more established security industry. That's after TechCrunch reported earlier this week that Dell Technologies sold security firm RSA for $2.1 billion.

Brannon sees the funding received by OneTrust and other vendors as a signal that the world understands the important of the privacy tech market. It is also a sign that entities have truly begun to separate privacy and security from one another.

"A lot of people just didn’t fundamentally get privacy and how it was different than security, but the importance is real, and you see that across all sectors. You see that across companies choosing not to do something because of privacy concerns. We’ve hit that inflection point in the market with everything that we are now able to do, from cloud computing to using and sharing data, that it has created these problems that are now board-level discussions. It’s a great indicator of the importance of this type of technology and of what everyone really thinks of in terms of a fundamental human right," Brannon said.

Read more about investments in the privacy tech market in "BigID receives $50M in new round of funding," "AvePoint closes $200M round of investments," "Securiti.ai receives $50M in funding for AI-focused privacy platform" and "TrustArc CEO discusses future following $70M funding round" by IAPP Associate Editor Ryan Chiavetta, CIPP/US

OneTrust may have been the first privacy unicorn, which is the term used to describe startups valued at more than $1 billion, but Brannon does not expect them to be the last. Entities that were not "pure privacy vendors" have started to enter the market thanks to laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and Brazil's General Data Protection Law, as well as all the issues surrounding third-party cookies.

"We expect to see more and more companies, and we welcome that," Brannon said. "We are going to see more vendors, more technologies and more innovation happening across tons of sectors."

Brannon said this round of funding will go toward its growth and help its customers "do what they need to do from a privacy-compliance and ethical-compliance standpoint." 

"Just like everything, it’s how you scale and be there for the market. Technology and investing significantly in the product is one aspect of that," Brannon said. "But it's also enabling partners in the market, building out and scaling our professional services, support teams and continuing to do everything to grow and scale the business."

Growth can be a challenge to manage, and OneTrust has experienced its fair share. The vendor has gone from 200 employees in September 2017 to 1,500 in February 2020 and has seen its customer base rise from 1,500 in September 2018 to 5,000. Brannon knows what the vendor has in front of them; however, he cited the leadership team's past experience with companies such as Manhattan Associates and Airwatch as reasons why it will be up to the task.

"There’s the tactical things of scaling the team and the business. You have more customers. You’ve got everything from more product and technology that you are building, more employees you are onboarding and things like that," Brannon said. "If you look at our track record on how you take on funding and how you scale your organization and what does it takes to do all that, it’s been very successful in the past."

The vendor has now received $410 million in investments in less than a year, and Brannon said the vendor expects more investors to knock on their door. Given the way the privacy tech market has grown in such a short amount of time, Brannon expects to look back at this moment as just one part of a long story.

"It’s great to get an indicator like this in the market, but it’s just one step in the journey," Brannon said. "We will look back years from now and talk about how small we were at this point in time compared to where all of this is going."

Photo by Ahmad Dirini on Unsplash