Gresham House Ventures has invested £1.4mn into ActiveNav, a developer of data privacy and governance software, as part of a £2mn series A+ round on behalf of the Mobeus VCTs.

Founded in 2008, ActiveNav, a leading data privacy and governance software provider, helps privacy and compliance teams quickly identify, inventory and map sensitive data.

Developed with the goal of achieving Zero Dark Data™ across all types of repositories, ActiveNav’s software discovers and maps data in minutes for compliance with a range of global privacy regulations, including GDPR, CPRA and others.

The investment builds on a previous £5mn investment from the Mobeus VCTs, which form part of the broader Gresham House Ventures offering alongside the Baronsmead VCTs.

This previous investment was part of an $11mn Series A round for ActiveNav in November 2019, following a strong period of growth during which the company bolstered its customer portfolio with some of the world’s best-known brands, including Equifax, the United States Army and Voya Financial.

The latest investment will be used to support the business in commercialising its new SaaS-based product, which provides mid-market companies with the ability to access enterprise-level data discovery solutions for unstructured data – datasets not stored in a structured database format. The investment for Gresham House Ventures is led by Rowan Grobler.

Start Up Group (SUG) and ActiveNav’s original angel investors made up the remaining £600k of the Series A+ round.

Rowan Grobler says:

ActiveNav has continued to impress us with the calibre of its management team and top-tier list of customers, and we are pleased to be able to provide further investment to support its innovative solutions. In what has previously been an underserved sector of the market, ActiveNav is ideally positioned to benefit from ongoing regulatory trends, and in turn, innovate within the maturing data privacy and compliance landscape in the coming years.”

Peter Baumann, CEO at ActiveNav, says:

The support of the Mobeus VCTs has been vital in accelerating the development of our software solutions in recent years in the rapidly expanding data privacy market. This additional funding lays the foundation for us to further build our B2B product offerings, expand our development and sales teams and continue to fuel our international growth.”