Meet the Santa Monica Cybersecurity Firm Helping Facebook Protect Its Data

Between a distinguished career as a U.S. Navy officer and various roles at IT and cybersecurity firms, Glen Day became the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services’ first chief privacy officer in 2002—a role tasked with overseeing HIPAA compliance for over a million medical patients.

At the time, governments and businesses alike were only beginning to understand the importance of privacy in a budding technological world, where data still straddled both analog and digital realms. Two decades later, the evolution of data storage and the cloud have turned companies into data hoarders. As a result, security breaches have become more sophisticated, and privacy compliance—from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation rules to California’s “right to be forgotten” law—has only increased.

“When you see companies dealing with these new ransomware attacks, it is a clear indicator that they've lost control of their data,” Day told dot.LA.

In 2018, Day founded NVISIONx, a Santa Monica-based cybersecurity startup that unveiled a $4.6 million seed funding round on Thursday. Boston-based Companyon Ventures led the round and was joined by investors Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund, SixThirty Ventures, Gutbrain Ventures, PBJ Capital and CreativeCo Capital.

NVISIONx founder Glen Day.

Day said he was inspired by his work at accounting giant Ernst and Young. There, he oversaw cybersecurity and intellectual property protections for companies like Nike, Qualcomm and Monster Energy, which would often have large databases filled with consumer information and unpatented intellectual property. Some companies would struggle to sift through large volumes of data to protect individuals’ privacy, which could then open them up to large fines if a security breach was discovered. Others had pieces of intellectual property or research and development data scattered across unprotected data containers, leaving them vulnerable to data leaks.

By getting rid of outdated or unnecessary data, Day said, companies can save millions of dollars on the security engineers and data storage costs often required to babysit large volumes of information. “When you purge the junk, not only does it reduce your compliance scope and reduce your attack surface—it also will save you millions on a recurring basis,” he said

The seed funding will go toward marketing costs, expanding NVISIONx’s technical offerings and integrations, and growing its sales team to garner more clients, Day added.