When Navindra Yadav left Cisco in late 2020, he had spent nearly seven years running Tetration Analytics, the network telemetry company he founded inside Insieme and saw acquired by Cisco, where he eventually carried the title of Cisco Fellow [Cisco Blogs, retrieved 2026]. His next bet, Theom, picks a narrower target than Tetration's sprawling network ambitions: the data sitting inside Snowflake, Databricks, and the cloud warehouses now feeding enterprise AI. Theom calls itself a Data and AI Operations Center, and its pitch to security buyers is that the perimeter worth defending is no longer the network. It is the table [Theom, retrieved 2025].
The company emerged from stealth in September 2022 with $16 million in seed funding [SecurityWeek, Sep 2022], and in May 2025 closed a $20 million Series A led by Wing Ventures, with strategic checks from Databricks Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and SentinelOne's S Ventures alongside existing backers Ridge Ventures and M12 [Theom, May 2025]. The cap table is the story buyers should read first. When the two largest cloud data platforms in the enterprise both write a strategic check into the same data security startup, it signals at minimum that Theom's agentless integration into their stores is working well enough to matter to their own field teams.
The bet
Theom sells an agentless platform that discovers sensitive data inside cloud data stores, classifies it using a transformer-based NLP engine, and watches access patterns for breach behavior using what the company describes as a GAN engine and an RLHF-tuned attack detection model [Theom, retrieved 2025]. The deployment story is the wedge: Theom runs without agents, uses native capabilities of each store, and keeps data inside the customer's environment [Theom, retrieved 2025]. For a CISO who has spent the last three years approving exception after exception so the data team could move faster, that profile is procurement-friendly. No agent means no kernel debate, no performance review with the platform team, and a much shorter security questionnaire from the buyer's own internal review board.
The ICP here is reasonably clear. Theom is built for mid-market and large enterprises with material Snowflake or Databricks footprints, an active generative AI program, and a CISO or CDO who owns data governance jointly with a chief data officer. The buyer is the security org, the budget is cyber, and the technical champion sits closer to the data platform team than to the SOC. Pricing is gated behind a demo request [Theom, retrieved 2025], which is standard for this stage but worth flagging for any buyer who wants comparable bake-offs.
Why the timing works
Two tailwinds favor Theom. The first is that enterprise AI projects have made data lineage and access control a board-level question, because the moment a fine-tuned model or a retrieval pipeline can surface a customer record, the legal exposure of misclassified data multiplies. The second is regulatory: SEC cybersecurity disclosure rules now require faster materiality determinations on breaches [Theom, retrieved 2025], which puts a premium on tools that can detect access anomalies inside the data store rather than at the network edge.
The investor signal reinforces both. A Wing Ventures lead, Gaurav Garg's firm, brings infrastructure-software pattern recognition. Databricks Ventures and Snowflake Ventures rarely co-invest in the same security startup, and when they do, it usually reflects shared customer pull. SentinelOne's S Ventures adds a plausible distribution path if Theom ever wants to be pulled into a broader platform conversation [Theom, May 2025].
Seed (Sep 2022) | 16 | $M
Series A (May 2025) | 20 | $M
Total disclosed | 36 | $M
The team
Navindra Yadav is Co-Founder and CEO [The Org, retrieved 2026], and his Tetration track record (founded January 2014, exited to Cisco, ran the unit through November 2020) is the single strongest credential on the page [ContactOut, retrieved 2026]. Co-founder Ravi Sankuratri, Co-Founder and COO since November 2020, was previously a senior principal engineer at Yahoo [The Org, retrieved 2026][Crunchbase, retrieved 2026]. Danesh Irani leads engineering as VP [Craft.co, retrieved 2026]. The founding bench draws from Google, Yahoo, and Cisco [Theom, retrieved 2025]. Repeat-founder premium is real in security, where buyers care a great deal about whether the CEO has shipped something an enterprise actually deployed at scale, and Yadav has.
Databricks has publicly described itself as deepening its partnership with Theom [AI-Tech Park, retrieved 2026], which, taken together with the Databricks Ventures check, suggests Theom is showing up in joint customer conversations rather than sitting on a partner page.
What bears will say, and what bulls answer
The most credible bear case is competitive density. Cyera raised at a multibillion-dollar valuation in 2024, Rubrik went public, Forcepoint has a long-standing data security book, and Flow Security was acquired by CrowdStrike. Theom is the smaller name in that competitive set and will face Cyera in particular on most enterprise shortlists. The bull answer, supported by the Series A syndicate, is that Theom's bet on agentless deployment plus native integration with Snowflake and Databricks gives it a cleaner technical fit for AI-era workloads than competitors whose architectures were designed for a SaaS sprawl problem rather than a warehouse problem [Theom, May 2025]. Whether that translates into seven-figure ACVs is the question the next 12 months have to answer.
A realistic competitive set for buyers running a bake-off: Cyera as the best-funded data security posture management vendor, Rubrik for buyers who want data security folded into a backup and recovery story, Forcepoint for buyers with an existing DLP relationship, and the native tooling inside Snowflake Horizon and Databricks Unity Catalog as the make-or-buy alternative every champion will be asked about by their own platform team.
What to watch
The near-term tells are commercial. Watch for named Fortune 500 customer references tied to Snowflake or Databricks deployments, which would validate that the strategic investor relationships are producing pipeline rather than just logos on a slide. Watch for any GSI partnership announcement, because data security at the enterprise tier rarely scales without a Deloitte or PwC motion behind it. And watch the renewal cohort from the 2023 and 2024 design-partner contracts, because in this category the only number that matters more than ARR growth is net revenue retention. A Series B in late 2026 priced off durable seven-figure logos would confirm the thesis. A Series B priced off pilot expansion alone would not.
The ICP is the cloud-data-heavy enterprise CISO with an active AI program. The procurement cycle is six to nine months. The budget owner is security, with a data-platform co-signer. The renewal motion is the open question, and the one I will be asking about first.
Pipe Haddad covers enterprise and SaaS for Startuply.