Commvault is buying Israeli startup Satori Cyber, expanding into data flow monitoring and AI security.
Once a data protection supplier rebrands itself as a cyber resilience provider – as Commvault now does – the boundary between its traditional role of backup and restore and its new remit of cyber resilience expands dramatically. It no longer just protects data by making a backup copy; it protects operational access to the backup source data and IT systems, trying to foil malware attacks and prevent the exfiltration of sensitive data. With AI large language models (LLMs) and agents accessing data, it checks on their operations to prevent them from doing damage as well. This expansion of the cyber resilience boundary and the rise of AI model and agent data access is why Commvault is buying Satori Cyber.
Commvault’s chief product officer, Rajiv Kottomtharayil, said in a statement:
“As enterprises accelerate AI and modern data platform adoption, securing sensitive data across distributed environments grows increasingly complex. By integrating Satori’s real-time, agentless controls and deep visibility into structured and AI training data, we’re extending our cyber resilience into the data layer – enabling secure data access, AI governance, and policy enforcement across platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, and Databricks to reduce risk and drive compliant innovation.”
Commvault says that, apart from its core data protection, it has a set of capabilities for discovery, classification, and policy management of unstructured data estates. Satori Cyber provides agentless DAM (Database Activity Monitoring), data access control, LLM monitoring and prompt protection, automated discovery, classification, and access management for structured data.
Satori Cyber – “Satori” is Japanese for enlightenment – was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, by CEO Eldad Chai and CTO Yoav Cohen in 2019. Chai and Cohen both previously worked at US cybersecurity software business Imperva and Incapsula, an Imperva spin-out in 2009 looking at website backdoor security, which was brought back in house in 2014. Imperva was acquired by Thoma Bravo in late 2018 and the two decided they wanted to do something new.
They settled on a cloud-based security service, as Cohen explained in 2019. The Satori Data Access Cloud is “a proxy service that sits between consumers of data and data stores.” It sits in front of data stores and inspects both queries and results to build a map of how data flows across the environment and applies privacy policies, considering a person’s identity, data being accessed, and behavioral activity. It supports both software-as-a-service and self-hosted deployment options.
Satori raised $5.25 million seed funding in 2019 and $20.5 million in an A-round in 2021, making $25.75 million in total. At the time of the A-round, Cohen said: “Having launched with multiple out-of-the-box integrations with the industry’s leading cloud data stores, such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Aurora, and Azure SQL, we empower data teams to roll out self-service access, row and column-level security, and dynamic de-identification across data stores in minutes.”
Chai now says: “Our next-generation AI capabilities integrated into Commvault’s cyber resilience platform will offer customers a unified approach to securing sensitive data and AI pipelines – from discovery to governance and from access management to cyber recovery.”
Commvault gains data security for structured and AI training data. It expects to track data flowing into LLMs and AI models, assess risk, and enable compliant recovery using its backup and cleanroom workflows.
The acquisition is expected to close in August. No acquisition price was revealed.
