Privitar raises $16M to help ensure privacy in big data analytics Posted on : Jul 20 - 2017

As data protection — a set of laws and practices created across different markets to ensure that our sensitive information does not get leaked or shared without our permission — continues to gain priority in our rapidly expanding digital world, a UK startup called Privitar that is building tools to help organizations keep that data private has picked up $16 million in funding to expand its tech platform and take its business to the US market.

The Series A round was led by France’s Partech Ventures with strategic participation from CME Ventures (the investing arm of derivatives marketplace CME) and, interestingly, Salesforce Ventures. Previous investors IQ Capital, 24Haymarket and Illuminate Financial also participated, bringing the total raised by two year-old Privitar to around $21 million (£16.5 million in local currency).

In an interview, CEO and co-founder Jason du Preez — who previously founded and sold a data distribution company, m35, to Reuters — described Privitar as a “privacy engineering” firm, which refers to a set of algorithms that are applied to data to help separate it from obvious and less obvious identifiers. This is not to be confused with more basic “anonymised” data.

“Often what people mean by ‘anonymised’ is that they’ve marked out basic identifiers, but as data becomes more complex there are other identifiers within the data that can be used to pinpoint a user, even without basics like name and date of birth, such as location,” he said. “That is the problem we have solved, with methods that analyse the data and expose the holes.”

In Privatar’s case, it offers two products today to help do this.

Privitar Publisher, “takes sensitive data and applies a privacy policy to create an anonymised copy which can safely be used for investigative analytics, machine learning, and sharing with trusted parties” by way of tokenization and encryption of identifying fields. And Privitar Lens is a “privacy-preserving query interface for reporting and statistical analysis. Privitar Lens allows analysts to perform sophisticated analytical queries of the data (e.g. counts, sums, histograms), but prevents direct access to the underlying sensitive data,” which is also known as differential privacy. On top of the products itself, Privitar logs and audits all queries. View More