The data economy is at the heart of the explosion of new innovative services in sectors from financial services to healthcare. However while the data economy continues to grow, it faces the challenge of protecting the privacy of consumers and companies.
Paris-based Cosmian has built a deep tech cryptography and blockchain platform to power a secure data economy. Founded in 2018, the startup has just finalised a seed round of €1.4 million led by Elaia, with participation from Acequia Capital, Financière de Blacailloux (Fiblac), and business angels.
Cosmian’s data intelligence platform was designed to be decentralised and respectful of privacy. Using the latest advances in functional and homomorphic encryption, it allows queries and calculations to be performed on encrypted private data without ever actually revealing the data itself.
“With Cosmian, we are solving the ‘Paradox of Private Data’: we allow to perform calculations on encrypted data without ever allowing access to the underlying data,” explained Sandrine Murcia, CEO of Cosmian. “Our solutions are aimed at companies that use private data, sensitive to their operation or the improvement of their existing services – while ensuring their compliance throughout their production chain. Using Cosmian’s technologies both protects the data and significantly reduces the risk of non-confidentiality associated with its use.“
According to Gartner, global business security spending reached $96.3 billion in 2018, and by 2020 more than 60% of companies will invest in multiple data security tools, such as prevention tools for data loss, encryption, and auditing and data protection.
“Within my CASCADE team, we develop cryptographic mechanisms of “privacy-by-design”, allowing to perform secure calculations in potentially malicious environments,” commented David Pointcheval, Director of the Computer Science Department at ENS. “We have a strong interest in the ambition of Cosmian to build bridges between the latest advances in cryptography and industrial applications, to bring together research of very high level and economic impact. We will be happy to see our high-level research work contributing to the development of this platform “
“We had already identified the scientific birth of homomorphic and functional ciphers that allow to calculate on encrypted data and thus to handle them without having to break the confidentiality rules that would be inherent to them,” said Xavier Lazarus, Partner at Elaia. “When the experienced team of Cosmian came to present their ambitious but realistic project that makes these technological advances available to the economic and social world, we didn’t hesitate; we rarely meet technologies capable of changing the world and Cosmian is!”
