Startup technology company Privately is a product of the frustration of Vaibhav Antil and his co-founders, Jasdeep Cheema and Prashant Mahajan. They launched the company, which is today announcing a $14 million Series A funding round after finding it nearly impossible to get to grips with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced by the European Union in 2018.
“At the time, as engineers, we were developing software products where we suddenly had to consider whether they complied with privacy legislation,” explains Antil. “It was extremely disruptive and there didn’t seem to be an easy way to fix the problem.”
That concern was heightened when Antil and his colleagues spent several months working with the product and engineering teams of a leading e-commerce company. Despite conducting a series of interviews with the teams, it proved nearly impossible to find out how they collect, store, use and share customers’ personal data – and thus whether the company was GDPR compliant. And because the company was constantly updating its software, that challenge became more complex.
Privado’s solution to this problem is a code scanner that automatically identifies through software what data it collects and what happens to this data. It provides the user with a tool that quickly maps their data practices so that they can be compared against what data privacy regulations require. “We’re kind of a spell checker for data privacy,” says Antil.
Privado, launched in 2020, works with an open source code scanning solution. The idea is that developers and engineers use the tool continuously, scan the software they’ve developed to identify potential data privacy issues – then rescan every time an update is performed.
In addition to identifying data usage and flows, Privado’s tool can be customized to identify potential breaches of specific legislation, for example the EU’s GDPR, as well as similar regulations developed by authorities in the US and Asia. “Engineers and privacy teams gain instant visibility into how their products and applications use personal data, can monitor personal data flows, and find privacy risks in the code, from leaks to logs,” explains Antil. The tool can also be set to block software updates that contain code that violates the company’s own privacy policy.
Privado founders think they can develop the “standard” data privacy scanner
The problem the company is solving is very real – and potentially very expensive. Data from Enforcement Tracker shows that companies worldwide have been fined €1.7 billion so far for breaches of the GDPR. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission is currently in the midst of a crackdown on data privacy issues — social media giant Twitter was fined $150 million earlier this year for violations of the FTC’s rules.
Despite being aware of the issue, organizations that constantly develop and update new software are vulnerable to violating regulations in exactly the same way. The scale and complexity of their code makes manual checks too challenging to be practical, especially as new releases are iterated quickly.
Hence the need for an automated scanner, says Privado. “Think of us as a grammar for your code – we give you a data privacy score for existing products and point out privacy and data security issues as you write new code,” Antil adds. “I expect to see a standard scan for data privacy issues in the future, just as such products exist in the cybersecurity world; we want to be that standard.”
The company is making good progress in this regard through a combination of a premium product, made available as a software-as-a-service tool, and a free version aimed at Android developers. Customer numbers aren’t available, but the company says it already manages more than 600,000 code commits for its customers.
The challenge now is to scale the business, with the Series A round providing funding for product development, recruiting and supporting the growth of Privado’s open source community.
Today’s $14 million round is the company’s second funding announcement of the year — it raised $3.5 million in seed funding in January — and is led by software investor Insight Partners and venture firm Sequoia Capital India, with participation of existing investors Together Fund and Emergent Ventures .
“Privado has created an intuitive platform that enables data and engineering teams to ensure that all development changes are privacy compliant in real time,” said Nikhil Sachdev, managing director at Insight. “With its experienced team of founders and innovative architecture, Privado has already made a name for itself in the DevSecOps space.”
Abhishek Mohan, director of Sequoia India, believes the company has identified a huge opportunity. “Privacy and data are two sides of the same coin,” he says. “Data has been one of the biggest trends in recent years and it’s only a matter of time before privacy catches up.”
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