Aurva, the first unified platform for Access monitoring and AI observability, has launched out of stealth with $2.2 million in seed funding. The oversubscribed round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from DeVC, and industry leaders including former Meta executives Chris Bream, Rahul Sood, Karandeep Anand, Postman founders Ankit Sobti, Abhinav Asthana and Cyware founders Akshat Jain and Anuj Goel.

Aurva will use the funding to expand its sales & marketing, security team, deepen AI observability capabilities, and support growing demand from India, U.S. and other global enterprise customers.

Recently named India’s Most Innovative Cybersecurity Startup of 2024 by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), Aurva is already serving dozens of enterprise customers in production environments across fintech, SaaS, and banking, including leading companies like Razorpay, Slice Bank, Yubi, PayTM and Meesho. Customer milestones include:

• 4B+ transactions per day monitored at one of the world’s largest financial institutions
• 1B+ queries per day analyzed at a leading digital bank and payments provider
• 2,000+ AI apps and agents auto-discovered and tracked at a large e-commerce provider

Aurva was founded by former Meta engineers Apurv Garg (CEO), Krishna Bagadia (CTO) and Akash Mandal (Architect). Bagadia previously helped design and scale Meta's internal data security systems, while Garg drove AI initiatives across business messaging units. Aurva's approach is inspired by Hipster, Meta's real-time data access control platform, and applies those lessons to high-scale enterprises now facing the security concerns from deploying AI-driven workloads.

From copilots embedded in tools to autonomous services operating in the background, AI-driven systems are accessing sensitive enterprise data in ways traditional tools can’t see or control. 

Aurva gives enterprises end-to-end visibility into who is accessing sensitive data, how, and why, tying every query or data flow to a real identity, whether human, service, or AI agent. 

“Existing tools were built for static environments. But AI is dynamic, it’s everywhere, and it just runs,” said Apurv Garg, founder and CEO of Aurva. “There are now countless ways data gets accessed, often without visibility. Enterprises need to rethink how they monitor sensitive data usage in real time; across humans, services, and AI agents. That’s why we built Aurva: to bring observability to AI usage and connect it directly to data access and flows.”

Legacy Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) tools were built for static environments, relying on delayed logs, generic alerts, and limited visibility into how data is actually used. In contrast, Aurva takes a fundamentally different approach, leveraging eBPF – a popular sandboxing approach at the kernel level used by Google, Netflix, Meta, and other enterprises to control software security – for real-time, low-overhead monitoring. The platform unifies Database Activity Monitoring (DAM), AI observability, and Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), enabling enterprises to protect sensitive data and meet compliance mandates from RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and DPDPA with confidence.

Also Read: IndiGrid Bags $4 Mn Investment Led by Cactus Venture Partners

"Security teams urgently need a runtime-first approach to data security, especially as AI systems autonomously interact with sensitive enterprise data," said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners. "Aurva's team has proven that they can build at scale, and they are bringing a robust enterprise-grade solution to market at the right time."

“Aurva gives us real time, identity aware visibility into data access, helping us prevent unauthorized use and privilege escalation while meeting regulatory guidelines,” said Ashwath Kumar, Head of Security at Razorpay. “As access becomes more agentic and ephemeral, we rely on Aurva to tie queries to identities and flag anomalies. It is a critical layer in keeping production safe at scale.”

“With the rapid growth of AI, understanding which identities, especially non-human ones, are accessing your data and how they are doing it has never been more important,” said Chris Bream, former Security Executive at Meta and an angel investor in the round. “Aurva is redefining what access monitoring should mean in an era of autonomous agents and service-based access by tying activity back to real identities. Their eBPF-based architecture offers a refreshing and modern approach, enabling flexible, low-overhead deployment. With their background in data systems and advanced threat actors, Apurv and Krishna have built a powerful platform that addresses real security problems.”