When Data Became the New Perimeter
In the last decade, data stopped being a byproduct—it became the business itself.
Every day, over 402 million terabytes of information are created across clouds, SaaS tools, endpoints, and IoT systems. Sensitive data such as PII, IP, and financial records now moves continuously between users and systems, powering analytics and AI models. The modern enterprise no longer has a single vault to protect; it has thousands of doors, each leading to a different data source.
Most security systems were built for a world where data stayed still. Today, data moves constantly between users, systems, and AI models, and the cracks are showing.
- AT&T (2024): 73 million customer records leaked, including Social Security numbers.
- Bank of America (2024): 55 thousand customers hit by ransomware and delayed disclosure.
- Dell (2024): 49 million users compromised after weeks of undetected partner exploitation.
The average cost of a breach now stands at $8.97 million, while more than 90% of sensitive enterprise data remains unseen by security teams. As data spreads across environments and becomes deeply intertwined with AI, perimeter-based security can no longer keep up.
Regulations and Compliance are Catching Up
Frameworks such as GDPR and CPRA enforce stricter controls on how data is stored, processed, and transmitted, adding to existing standards like HIPAA and SOX. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 marks another critical step, establishing national standards for privacy, cross-border transfers, and accountability.
This creates a new market opportunity for intelligent, autonomous systems that not only ensure compliance but adapt as data moves.
A Market at Inflection
The convergence of rising data volumes, tightening regulation, and accelerated AI adoption has brought data security to the forefront of enterprise transformation.
The $68B data security market is expanding rapidly as enterprises modernize their protection stacks. Yet adoption of next-generation tools remains nascent, with fewer than 1% of organizations having implemented adaptive, AI-aware systems. Legacy DLP and DSPM tools, built for a static world, continue to rely on rule-based detection, generating excessive false positives while missing the contextual signals that drive real risk.
Amid this shift, enterprises are seeking systems that can secure data continuously, understanding how it moves, why it’s accessed, and what it powers.
Matters.AI – The AI Security Engineer
Matters.AI is built for this new reality. It doesn’t add another tool to the stack; it functions as an AI Security Engineer, a self-learning system that can see, understand, and protect data everywhere before incidents occur.
By fusing semantic graph intelligence with predictive reasoning, Matters.AI understands relationships, intent, and behavior across environments. It replaces static detection with autonomous protection, learning continuously from how data is created, shared, and used.
Legacy tools monitor. Matters.AI understands. It bridges the long-standing gap between visibility and enforcement by unifying discovery, lineage, and context-aware controls into a single intelligent layer. The result is fewer false positives, faster response, and stronger protection, delivered autonomously.
Already trusted by 50+ enterprises, including Fortune 500s and fintech unicorns, Matters.AI safeguards petabytes of sensitive data and billions of daily events
The Founding Team
he vision behind Matters.AI comes from founders who’ve lived the data security challenge firsthand. For Keshava Murthy and Harsh Sahu, Matters.AI is the culmination of years spent building and securing enterprise-scale AI systems, experience that revealed how fragmented and reactive existing security models had become.
As founding engineers at Observe.AI, a unicorn AI platform for enterprise contact centers, they helped scale the company from seed stage to a billion-dollar valuation, building systems that handled sensitive data at global scale. That experience offered a front-row view of the widening gap between visibility and protection, inspiring them to rebuild security from first principles. They’ve since built a community of over 1,000 CISOs, grounding their product roadmap in practitioner feedback.
Looking Ahead
As enterprises embed AI across every layer of their business, data has become both their most valuable and most vulnerable asset. The challenge is no longer where data resides, but how it moves, who accesses it, and why.
The next phase of security will be defined by systems that can think, not just react, understanding context, predicting misuse, and acting autonomously. Legacy tools built for static environments can’t secure the dynamic, data-rich enterprise of today.
At Kalaari, we’re excited to partner with Matters.AI as they pioneer this next frontier of autonomous data defense and redefine how enterprises protect what truly matters.
Keshava Murthy, Co-founder and CEO at Matters.ai on partnering with Kalaari
We partnered with Kalaari because they’re one of the few firms in India that truly understand cybersecurity and deep tech in depth. Sampath and the team bring a calm, composed, deeply technical perspectiv; the kind that doesn’t just chase trends, but studies the architecture behind innovation.
Their conviction in backing foundational technology, their patience with complex GTM cycles, and their empathy for founders building from first principles made them stand out immediately. In a market where most investors look for traction, Kalaari looked for depth; and that’s exactly the kind of partner we wanted for Matters
Sampath P, Partner at Kalaari Capital, says-
As privacy regulations tighten worldwide and AI adoption accelerates, enterprises face an urgent need for intelligent, autonomous data protection. Matters.AI is building the control layer for this new reality — a system that learns, adapts, and secures data while ensuring continuous compliance in an AI-driven world
Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.
If you are a founder building an early-stage company, write to us at pitch@kalaari.com
