Unstructured Data Discovery and Information Governance for Zero Dark Data

ActiveNav sells unstructured data discovery and information governance software to organizations that have lost track of what sits in their file shares, mailboxes and document repositories. Co-founded by chief executive Peter Baumann and describing itself as more than fifteen years into the problem, the company frames the challenge as "dark data" and the goal as complete visibility into what an enterprise holds. Customers span law firms, financial services, insurance, energy, utilities, federal government, and state and local education, across roughly thirty countries.

The flagship product, ActiveNav Cloud, runs as a SaaS platform on Snowflake infrastructure and uses automated collectors to index file shares, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Exchange, iManage, NetDocuments and on-premise stores. Analysis pairs metadata inspection with content-level classification, scoring files for sensitive material such as PII, financial data and client records, then mapping hotspots against data owners, business function, geography and repository. Dashboards and exportable, audit-ready reports feed remediation decisions including deletion, quarantine, migration and labelling.

Two things set the approach apart. Scale is one: the vendor cites discovery rates of eight million files per hour across petabyte-sized estates, plus an on-premise alternative, the DC Project Suite, for regulated or legacy environments running SharePoint and OpenText Content Server. The other is legal-sector depth. MatterID identifies and classifies large volumes of client matters by reconciling repository content against time, billing and intake systems, supporting attorney offboarding, mergers and defensible cleanup, with ISO/IEC 27001 certification underpinning the cloud service.