As enterprises push to adopt AI at scale, a critical bottleneck emerges – 74% of organizations cite data security as their most significant barrier, yet nearly half of security teams face budget cuts while a global shortage of five million security professionals deepens the crisis. Traditional data security tools exacerbate the problem rather than solve it, scanning for standard patterns and generating tens of thousands of low-value alerts that overwhelm teams without providing clear paths to remediation. Teleskope addresses this fundamental gap with the industry’s first agentic data security platform that operates like a human security team – automatically discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data while taking autonomous action to remediate risk in real time. The platform’s proprietary multi-stage classification pipeline processes 40,000 bytes per second with 99.3% accuracy, applies company-specific policies with full business context, and actively fixes issues from revoking improper access to enforcing retention periods, effectively embedding a 24/7 data security team within enterprise environments. With dozens of customers including Ramp, LegalZoom, Alloy, GoFundMe, and The Atlantic already using the platform to reduce storage costs while strengthening security posture, Teleskope addresses an $80B market opportunity by 2030.
AlleyWatch sat down with Teleskope CEO and Founder Elizabeth Nammour to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We just raised a $25M Series A, led by M13, with continued support from Primary Venture Partners and Lerer Hippeau. This brings our total funding to $32.2M. Primary led our seed and Lerer Hippeau led our pre-seed, so in this round we really wanted to continue to build with partners who’ve believed in Teleskope since the very beginning, while bringing in an exceptional new partner in M13. This new capital will help us scale our team and deepen our investment in the industry’s first agentic data security platform.
Tell us about the product or service that Teleskope offers.
Teleskope is the industry’s first agentic data security platform, which understand business context and can take action to find and remediate data risks that truly matter to a specific business. Enterprises are drowning in fragmented data, and as AI adoption accelerates, most legacy tools can’t keep up. At best, they find problems but leave security teams without answers.
Teleskope automatically discovers, classifies, and contextualizes sensitive data across cloud, SaaS, and hybrid environments, then takes real action: revoking access, redacting content, enforcing policies, or fixing misconfigurations in real time. Our multi-stage classification pipeline combines ML routing, specialized AI models, deterministic logic, and contextual reasoning to deliver highly accurate results at scale.
Instead of generating tens of thousands of low-value alerts, Teleskope customers get meaningful, highly contextual insights, paired with autonomous remediation.
What inspired the start of Teleskope?
My time as a security engineer at Airbnb is what sparked Teleskope. I was responsible for making sense of hundreds of petabytes of data, spread across dozens of platforms, and the tools I tested just could not scale to anywhere near what we needed. They lacked context, they lacked contextual insight, generated mostly false positives or irrelevant alerts, and put all the manual burden back on the team.
I knew we needed a platform that could adapt to our priorities and environment, and do more than find potential data risk, and actually reduce it. With advances in AI capabilities over the last few years, I realized there was an opportunity to build a smarter, more scalable product – one that could actually think like a human – one that understood context, prioritized real risk, and took action automatically to protect data at production scale. That experience and the opportunity I saw in the market is what ultimately became the foundation for Teleskope.
How is Teleskope different?
Most data security tools stop at visibility. They tell you where the problems are but don’t help you fix them, and security teams are already stretched thin. Teleskope was built to close that gap.
Our platform understands context, applies company-specific policies, and takes autonomous action to remediate risk at scale. Instead of dumping alerts on teams, it behaves like a human analyst, prioritizing what matters and acting instantly. We work across cloud, SaaS, and hybrid environments, deploy quickly, and integrate cleanly into existing workflows.
As data grows and AI adoption accelerates, teams need to be able to react in real time to avoid exposing sensitive data. Security teams need a platform that acts fast, at scale, the way their own team would – and that’s what Teleskope delivers.
What market does Teleskope target and how big is it?
We operate in the DSPM and broader data security market, but with a focus on agentic, action-driven enforcement and remediation. Our customers are primarily midmarket and enterprise organizations, especially those in highly regulated or data-heavy industries.
Data is exploding, regulations are tightening, and AI is increasing the blast radius of every exposure. With security teams understaffed and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of this challenge, autonomous remediation is becoming essential. As we continue to deliver a fully agentic platform that reduces manual work and eliminates alert fatigue, we estimate our global market opportunity will reach roughly $80 billion by 2030.
We’re building the platform security teams have needed for years: one that helps them keep up with their data, adopt AI safely, and reduce risk in real time.
What’s your business model?
We’re a SaaS platform with a usage-based model designed for enterprises with complex, fast-growing data environments. Customers subscribe to Teleskope to automatically discover, classify, and remediate data risks across cloud, SaaS, and hybrid environments. Our value is both security and operational efficiency. Many customers tell us the platform pays for itself through storage reduction and automated cleanup alone, for example, by enforcing retention periods on certain types of documents. Because we focus on end-to-end remediation, teams save enormous manual effort, which compounds the ROI.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Honestly, our focus hasn’t changed: build software that works. That discipline is what keeps us resilient. We’ve spent years grounding our roadmap in customer needs—automation, accuracy, and the ability to reduce manual work. In a slowdown, automation and remediation become even more critical because security teams are understaffed and budgets shrink. Teleskope helps enterprises do more with less: cut waste, reduce storage costs, and eliminate thousands of hours of manual remediation. This is a product that drives efficiency within security teams, so economic pressure actually strengthens our value proposition.
What was the funding process like?
The process was fast and highly conviction-driven. Many of our investors have been following our work since the early days—some discovered Teleskope through the technical blogs I wrote about building the internal platform at Airbnb. With strong product-market fit and a roster of happy customers who recognized the value of our unique value proposition, approach and technical capacity, the momentum was clear to investors. By the time we started the Series A raise, the market shift toward agentic security and AI-driven remediation only added tailwinds to our growth story.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The biggest challenge was helping investors understand how fundamentally different remediation is from detection. Most tools in our space surface alerts and very few take action. That distinction seems subtle until you see it in practice. We had to articulate why enterprises don’t just need visibility; they need a platform that acts like a human security team. And there’s a reason this hasn’t been build – it’s a deeply technical challenge that has eluded many of the existing vendors in this space. Once investors saw how agentic automation changes data security outcomes at scale, and how our technical foundation makes us uniquely positioned to deliver this solution, the conversations shifted quickly.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
A few things stood out:
- A massive, validated pain point: Enterprises everywhere are drowning in data, and AI adoption adds both risk and urgency to the problem.
- A paradigm shift toward remediation: Investors could clearly see the need to move from dashboards and alerts to real fixes.
- Deep customer traction and ROI: Our early customers were not only renewing but expanding, with some paying back the cost of the platform exclusively through storage savings.
- Technical differentiation: Our agentic automation, multi-stage classification pipeline, and policy-aware remediation go far beyond what traditional DSPM tools offer and in many cases beyond what they will be able to build.
- Founder-problem fit: My experience building similar tools at Airbnb showed investors we understood the problem at a deep, technical scale.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Over the next six months, we’re laser-focused on expanding our agentic automation so the platform can understand and enforce more complex data management, security, and privacy policies automatically. At the same time, we’re continuing to expand the contextual insights we can provide, which in turn unlocks the ability for customers to enforce more nuanced and targeted remediate actions. We’re also doubling down on customer experience and deployments, ensuring that every new enterprise can get up and running quickly and start seeing remediation value immediately. With the traction we have seen over the past two quarters, H1 2026 will be all about scaling up go-to-market to be able to keep up with demand. To support this growth and deepen our investment in R&D, we’re rapidly expanding our data science, engineering, and go-to-market teams and expect to nearly double the team’s size by June 2026.
Over the next six months, we’re laser-focused on expanding our agentic automation so the platform can understand and enforce more complex data management, security, and privacy policies automatically. At the same time, we’re continuing to expand the contextual insights we can provide, which in turn unlocks the ability for customers to enforce more nuanced and targeted remediate actions. We’re also doubling down on customer experience and deployments, ensuring that every new enterprise can get up and running quickly and start seeing remediation value immediately. With the traction we have seen over the past two quarters, H1 2026 will be all about scaling up go-to-market to be able to keep up with demand. To support this growth and deepen our investment in R&D, we’re rapidly expanding our data science, engineering, and go-to-market teams and expect to nearly double the team’s size by June 2026.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Focus on discipline and fundamentals. Get clear on what truly drives revenue, cut or pause anything that doesn’t, and be realistic about timelines and growth expectations. In a tight capital environment, durability matters more than speed.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re entering the next phase of agentic data security. Visibility is no longer enough—CISOs and security teams need systems that understand business context and fix issues automatically. Our near-term focus is scaling that capability across more environments, more data types, and more policies.
With dozens of enterprise customers and 22 more in pilot, growth is accelerating quickly. The next chapter is all about giving companies a fully autonomous data security layer that lets them adopt AI safely and confidently.
What’s one of your favorite destinations in and around the city?
Black Mountain Wine House — once fall hits, it’s dimly lit and cabin-like, with a great wine list that fits the season perfectly.
