Theta Lake, a unified communications security startup, has raised $50 million in Series B funding. The twist? Some of the world's leading video conferencing and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) companies opened their wallets to participate in the funding.
Indeed, the Series B round includes new money from RingCentral, Salesforce and Zoom. The round also includes investments from existing investors Cisco Systems, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Neotribe Ventures. To date, the company has raised some $70 million.
What do the top drawer UCaaS providers see in Theta Lake? For one, its solution is tightly integrated with collaboration platforms Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom. Additional integrations include Symphony, Verint and Vidyard. Theta Lake positions itself as category defining, with a platform capable of capturing, archiving, detecting and surfacing risk across video, visual, voice, chat, document and email content.
For another, the platform adds advanced security and compliance coverage across what is shared, shown, spoken, and typed (as Theta Lake puts it). The company believes that it is increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of compliance and risk teams, while reducing the cost of security and compliance. And, its platform is vendor agnostic and plays to customers in financial services, the public sector, healthcare and technology, officials said.
Secure Digital Collaboration
Ultimately, Theta Lake of Santa Barbara, California, wants to be recognized as the go-to player for providing security and compliance for modern digital collaboration. “At Theta Lake, we are rearchitecting compliance with integrated security for the modern communication and information sharing platforms of today’s workforce,” said Devin Redmond, the company’s chief executive and co-founder. “We have seen tremendous adoption of our platform and it is inspiring to see customers using our solutions to unlock more collaboration and productivity for their end-users. Modern compliance and security should be a strategic enabler and we are proving that it can be,” he said.
To substantiate its market opportunity, Theta Lake pointed to some figures from researcher Gartner that estimate by 2025, 45 percent of regulated enterprise customers will conduct supervision of audio/video content to meet compliance requirements, up from less than 10 percent in 2021. And, in the same period, 35 percent of enterprise customers will archive work stream collaboration and meeting solutions for non-regulated requirements, an increase of more than sevenfold from 2021.
“Theta Lake is built for the world of video, voice, and work stream collaboration with partner integrations and now, strategic investments from many of the key leaders in the video meeting and work stream collaboration space,” the company said.
Theta Lake Partner Program: Coming Soon?
Dig around the Theta Lake website menu, and you won't find any mention of a partner program. But that may soon change. The company apparently is seeking to hire a Head of Strategic Partnerships to oversee technology relationships, and to develop and manage "partner activation and engagement programs."
Meanwhile, most of the major UCaaS platform providers already offer VAR- and MSP-oriented partner programs. We'll be watching to see if Theta Lake becomes a natural add-on service for MSPs in the UCaaS sector.
