Why We Invested: Baffle
August 30, 2021
At National Grid Partners, we invest in Decarbonization, Decentralization, and Digitization of the broader energy infrastructure. We back founder-centric, tech-differentiated startups that have the potential to be category-creators.
I was introduced to Ameesh Divatia, the CEO of Baffle, Inc., by Engineering Capital’s Ashmeet Sidana. When Ashmeet described the product principles, my first reaction was: Why didn’t somebody think about this earlier? My second reaction was: Is the engineering underlying the product even possible to pull off?
As Ameesh described the underlying concept of the Baffle solution, I realized it was both elegant and, more importantly, checked off several enterprise requirements. Think banks and financial institutions, industrial conglomerates with vast digital asset IoT infrastructure, and even highly regulated critical infrastructure like energy and utilities.
Vast troves of extremely valuable data (especially customer and business sensitive data) reside in databases, and a significant portion of these reside on-prem or in private clouds. Given the push to adopt public cloud infrastructure, and with enterprises reinventing their data stacks to include a data lake, data warehouse, or a combination thereof (lake house?), cloud migration can become a tricky, if not a scary, proposition from a security point of view.
Increasingly, an organization’s data infrastructure is not just likely to be multi-cloud and hybrid (spanning on-prem and cloud), but may also involve microservices, serverless functions, containers, and API gateways. Securing sensitive data in such a diverse and distributed environment is a tremendous challenge.