Aware provides AI-enhanced controls and data governance for the leading digital collaboration and communication technologies often used in remote work

Columbus, Ohio —Aware, the only comprehensive AI solution for governance, risk, compliance (GRC) and insights for leading digital collaboration technologies, today announced a $12 million Series B equity investment led by New York-based Spring Mountain Capital with participation from Blue Heron Capital and Allos Ventures.

“We’re excited to partner with investors who truly understand our space and the opportunity,” said Jeff Schumann, CEO and Co-Founder of Aware. “The use of enterprise collaboration and communication tools is only increasing with the influx of remote work. We see an opportunity to provide necessary controls and to derive incredible business insights using our proprietary AI.”

Aware offers a unified view across many of the tools now considered vital to remote work, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Workplace from Facebook. Aware’s platform provides AI-enhanced controls and governance capabilities for the nuanced conversation data set that lives within these communication tools. Additionally, Aware continuously enriches the conversation data that flow through the tools with proprietary natural language processing (NLP) and AI models, providing organizational value and insights such as ongoing employee sentiment and commonly discussed themes.

“Aware is uniquely positioned to tackle today’s remote-work-first world with the team’s extensive background in understanding digital conversations,” said Jamie Weston, Managing Director of Spring Mountain Capital. “Aware solves an immediate risk and compliance need, but also has an incredible vision for the future. We’re thrilled to partner with Jeff and team on this next stage of the company.”

Aware was founded in 2017 and quickly penetrated the enterprise market by securing high-profile customers across the globe including Wipro, AstraZeneca, Sun Life Financial, Farmers Insurance, Memorial Health System and British Telecom. Common GRC use cases for Aware include archiving, eDiscovery, monitoring/DLP, data management and preservation, bi-directional retention and regulatory compliance controls. The investment will accelerate the company’s go-to-market efforts, increase partnerships, grow Aware’s integration ecosystem and support ongoing product research and development.

Existing investors Draper Triangle Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund, JumpStart, Rev1 Ventures and JobsOhio also participated in the round.

About Aware
Aware delivers AI-infused governance, compliance and monitoring for enterprise organizations deploying today’s leading collaboration and messaging platforms, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Workplace from Facebook. Aware’s comprehensive platform solves common challenges that legal, compliance, information security and IT departments face when rolling out collaboration, including archiving, monitoring, organization insights, DLP, eDiscovery, retention and legal holds. Aware is a Microsoft Gold Partner, Slack compliance partner and a Workplace by Facebook integration partner. Leading research analyst firm Gartner announced Aware as a Gartner Cool Vendor based on the September 11, 2018 report titled, “Cool Vendors in Unified Communications and Collaboration Technologies.”

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