The cybersecurity industry has advanced significantly over the last decade, but data breaches and ransomware attacks at large corporations continue to occur relatively frequently.

Glen Day, founder and chief executive of Santa Monica-based NVISIONx, said that’s largely because companies aren’t doing an adequate job of organizing and conducting inventory of potentially sensitive information.

“Data protection controls don’t work if you don’t know what you need to protect,” Day said. “There’s no option to protect everything at the same level because otherwise you would break the business.”

The problem, said Day, is that most companies with vast data storage demands struggle to differentiate between files that contain sensitive information requiring a high level of security and those that require less protection.

A former cybersecurity principal at Ernst & Young Global, Day said the idea behind NVISIONx is to provide companies with a system with which they can better classify files that contain valuable financial information or intellectual property so that this data can be prioritized for protection from cyberattacks.

The company, which launched in 2018, has developed a data risk intelligence platform that allows a company’s information technology, business and cybersecurity leaders to collaborate when inventorying sensitive data assets so that these can be better tracked.

Day said the platform allows cybersecurity and data storage resources to be more efficiently utilized and that it is already being used by multiple Fortune 500 companies.

On Jan. 27, NVISIONx announced that it had raised $4.6 million in a seed funding round led by Boston-based Companyon Ventures. The company also said that former International Business Machines Corp. executive Rod Adkins had joined its board of directors.

Day said the newly acquired capital, along with the expertise offered by Adkins, will help the company scale its operations and market its digital security services to new customers.

One of the biggest advantages — and a potential challenge — for NVISIONx is the widespread applicability of its services, Day added.

The key for NVISIONx will be reaching clients that might have become complacent when it comes to managing cybersecurity threats.

“We’ve got to simplify the message and give more persona-driven examples of how this could benefit their existing objectives and strategic initiatives,” Day said.