Nightfall AI, a startup providing cloud data loss prevention services, today announced that it raised $40 million in Series B financing from investors including WestBridge Capital, Venrock, Bain Capital Ventures and -- for some reason -- athletes and celebrities including Paul Rudd, Drew Brees and Josh Childress. CEO Isaac Madan says that the proceeds will be put toward doubling Nightfall's 60-person headcount, scaling the platform to more customers and markets, and expanding Nightfall's partner ecosystem. Isaac was previously a VC investor at Venrock, where he focused on early-stage investments in software as a service, security and machine learning. Rohan was one of the founding engineers at Uber Eats, where he designed and built software to grow the platform's footprint. Madan says he and Sathe were inspired to launch Nightfall by Sathe's personal experiences with data breaches arising from poor "data security hygiene."

Nightfall (formerly Watchtower AI), a San Francisco-based provider of cloud data loss prevention solutions, today emerged from stealth with $20.3 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock, with participation from Pear VC and Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath. CEO Isaac Madan said the proceeds from this latest round will bolster Nightfall's R&D and market expansion. "Our mission at Nightfall is to build the control plane for cloud data, enabling enterprises to know what data they have across the cloud, and to proactively manage and protect that information," said Madan, who was previously with Venrock's investment division. Nightfall's eponymous platform monitors data flowing into and out of the services a customer uses, which machine learning algorithms classify as sensitive, personally identifiable (PII), noncompliant (with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR), or safe to share. Using a visual dashboard, admins can set up automated workflows for quarantines, deletions, alerts, and more that integrate with dozens of software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms and APIs, and view analytics metrics like real-time and historical PII count by type.

Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma – a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov's short story "Nightfall" that derailed Proyas' academic career. "It's a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy," says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in "Nightfall" when all six of a planet's suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. "I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn't. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore."