College Park’s Immuta and IonQ both raised millions in new VC funding

Data governance company Immuta, which has a product and engineering team based in College Park, closed on $40 million in funding as it looks to grow data governance technology with new platforms and customers.

The Series C funding round was led by Intel Capital, the venture arm of tech pioneer Intel and a new investor in the company. Silicon Valley-based Ten Eleven Ventures, another new investor, also participated in the round, along with existing investors DFJ Growth, Dell Technologies Capital, Greycroft, Drive Capital and Citi Ventures. It follows a $20 million Series B round in 2018.

Founded in 2015, Immuta makes a platform designed for organizations that work with data that is subject to specific business rules, as well as regulations from the government. The platform automates the process by which large organizations control data access, and ensures that users can only see the data that their role allows them to see. Along with maintaining privacy for users, this governance can help to comply with specific regulations, such as healthcare’s HIPAA and Europe’s more general GDPR privacy regs.

Immuta’s customers include organizations in financial, healthcare, government and manufacturing. It has also integrated its technology with cloud and data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake and Amazon Web Services.

“The investment we’re announcing today,” said CEO Matthew Carroll in a statement, “will help us accelerate platform innovation, enhance and expand our strategic partnerships, and bring to market new, industry-specific solutions to automate compliance with HIPAA, CCPA, COPPA and other regulations.”

The investment round comes several months after the company formally shifted its headquarters from College Park to Boston. Immuta has had a virtual team while maintaining offices in those cities as well as Columbus, Ohio in recent years. As it scaled go-to-market teams, it made the decision to shift headquarters in February.

In College Park, Immuta is among the tech companies with offices in the Diamondback Garage innovation hub, which is located in the near the University of Maryland campus. That’s part of the Discovery District, which is a development bringing together students and staff from the university, federal researchers and tech companies.

The 75-employee company’s engineering and product teams are based in College Park, as well as public sector sales and support teams.

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The investment in Immuta is just the latest funding news out of a College Park company located in the Discovery District: Last week, quantum computing startup IonQ also said it extended a $55 million Series B funding round that was initially announced last year with about $7 million in additional investment, TechCrunch reported. The five-year-old company, which has more than 50 employees, has now raised a total of $84 million.

The new funding included investment from Lockheed Martin, Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Cambium.

IonQ raises additional funding for its quantum computing platform https://t.co/QXEm7fzbuZ by @fredericl

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) June 16, 2020

Harnessing quantum mechanics, quantum computers hold out the promise of working faster and solving more complex problems than traditional computers like the one on which you’re reading this story. IonQ is developing quantum computers with trapped ions, “which is ions which are being suspended in a vacuum and using electromagnets to hold them,” CEO Peter Chapman told TechCrunch.

Along with the new funding, the company also said it is adding four advisors:

• Umesh Vazirani, Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the co-director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center
• David Wineland, Nobel Laureate and Philip H. Knight Distinguished Research Chair of the University of Oregon Department of Physics
• Margaret (Peg) Williams, former senior VP of research and development at Cray Inc.
• Kenneth Brown, associate professor at the Duke University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering