Sentra, the New York data security company founded in 2021, closed a $150 million Series C led by Capital One Ventures on November 4. Its last round was a $50 million Series B led by Key1 Capital in April 2025. No valuation was given. The company has about 210 employees.
Capital One leading is a signal on its own. Banks are among the biggest buyers of data loss prevention, and a bank’s venture arm putting money in suggests the bank already sees the problem Sentra sells against: copilots and agents reading data they were never meant to see.
The problem agents create
Most companies have years of over-shared files, stale permissions and sensitive records sitting in places nobody tracks. That was a slow-burning risk when only people could search it. An AI assistant connected to the same drives and inboxes finds everything its user can reach, in seconds, and pastes it into an answer. The permission mess becomes a live leak.
Sentra started with data discovery and classification, finding where sensitive data sits across cloud and on-premises stores. It’s now building that into a broader platform: DLP, data security posture management, AI governance, agent security and identity and access controls. The near-term use cases are cleanup work. Fix excessive permissions before rolling out a copilot, and make sure sensitive data doesn’t reach the wrong model or user.
CEO Yoav Regev spent nearly 24 years in Israel’s Unit 8200, finishing as head of its cyber department. He names Proofpoint and Cyera as the competitors he meets head to head. Cyera has raised far more money in the same category, which is why this round matters for Sentra. The buyers are changing too. Regev says CIOs and chief data officers now sit in deals that used to belong only to the CISO.
Schools want the same control over Google
A smaller release the same day shows the same fight at the consumer end. Securly, the K-12 web filter, extended its Restrict AI Mode setting to block Google’s AI Overviews as well as AI Mode. Students see ordinary search results without the AI summary on top. Images, video and news still work, and administrators can switch the block on by grade.
The timing is not an accident. Google has said that from early next year, Gemini and Search will be off by default for K-12 student accounts, and a district that wants Search will get it with AI attached. There’s no plain search option. That leaves districts with AI bans, such as New York City through 8th grade, choosing between AI they’ve banned and no search at all. A filter vendor that strips the AI back out solves that, at least until Google changes the page.
Securly says it covers more than 20 million students in 27,000 schools, and its AI monitoring tool has logged 6.2 million student AI conversations across 1,806 districts since December.
Both stories come down to the same question. Who decides what an AI system is allowed to read and show? For Sentra’s customers the answer has to be the data owner. Expect the next funding announcements in this category to quote permission cleanup numbers, because that’s the work buyers will pay for first.