Sentra, a provider of agentic data security solutions, has raised $150 million in a strategic funding round led by Capital One Ventures. The investment comes as businesses accelerate the adoption of AI agents that can access sensitive information faster than security teams can establish appropriate governance controls.
Capital One Ventures joins Sentra’s existing investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Zeev Ventures, Standard Investments, Munich Re Ventures and Key1 Capital. As part of the investment, Capital One will also secure a seat on Sentra’s board.
The funding follows a year of significant growth for Sentra, with the company reporting growth of more than 300% compared with the previous year. This expansion has been driven by enterprises looking for ways to identify and manage their data, control which human and AI identities can access it, and maintain governance as autonomous agents become more widely adopted.
According to Sentra, three major challenges are reshaping the data security landscape. First, businesses are under pressure to deploy AI quickly, while copilots, assistants and cloud-based AI services are advancing faster than existing governance frameworks can adapt. Second, sensitive information is distributed across cloud platforms, SaaS applications and on-premise systems, making it difficult for traditional visibility tools to maintain oversight and prevent excessive permissions or data exposure.
The third challenge involves AI agents, which operate as new identities and continuously access information at machine speed without a central point of control. Sentra notes that large organisations that operated only a few agents a year ago expect their numbers to increase significantly, although few currently have governance systems capable of properly limiting the information these agents can access.
To address these challenges, Sentra focuses on protecting data at rest rather than examining every individual AI agent request in real time. Its platform covers cloud environments, SaaS applications, data warehouses, on-premise file shares and the knowledge repositories that supply information to AI systems.
Before a security incident occurs, the platform identifies and classifies sensitive information, maps the access permissions of employees, service accounts and AI agents, including inherited permissions, and applies least-privilege controls to non-human identities. It also identifies and removes redundant, outdated or potentially risky data.
When an incident occurs, Sentra detects unusual access to sensitive information, automatically revokes permissions, removes risky sharing arrangements and notifies relevant data owners about serious issues through existing workflows. Following an incident, the platform reconstructs the information an AI agent could have accessed, helping security, legal and compliance teams understand the situation and respond with the necessary business context.
Sentra plans to use the newly raised capital to further develop its agentic data security capabilities. Its priorities include expanding visibility across AI agents, copilots and models, along with the sensitive information they access. The company also plans to strengthen continuous least-privilege enforcement across all identities, protect stored data before AI agents can access it, and improve its ability to quickly contain agents that behave unexpectedly.
In addition to product development, Sentra intends to expand its field and channel operations, strengthen its brand and marketing activities, and enter new geographical markets.
The company identifies the combination of data intelligence and identity mapping as a key differentiator, particularly for large and complex enterprise environments. Sentra classifies sensitive information according to each organisation’s requirements and connects every human and non-human identity, including AI agents, with the data it is authorised to access.
This approach enables organisations to identify and correct risky permissions before they can be exploited by attackers or AI agents. Sentra also processes all analysis within the customer’s own environment, ensuring that sensitive information does not leave that environment.
The company contrasts this approach with competing tools that transfer customer data to external environments, which can create additional security requirements and introduce data retention, residency and compliance challenges, particularly for regulated industries.
By keeping customer data in its original environment, Sentra says it can support multiple environments at a lower cost. The company also reports consistently receiving top ratings in the data security posture management category on independent peer review platforms.
