Swiss startup Decentriq, an enterprise data security expert, today announces an approx. €3.2 million seed round, led by btov Partners, with significant participation from Paladin Capital Group and existing investor Atlantic Labs. The investment is intended to drive international growth and to widen its client base. Founded in 2018, Decentriq minimizes the time and cost for enterprises to establish and maintain sensitive data ecosystems, e.g. when two entities want to share data.
As business models increasingly rely on big data, a major challenge for enterprises is to be able to access and analyze sensitive data at scale and in a secure environment. At the same time, data owners should be able to decide who uses their data and how. Currently, this is only possible through legal contracts or partly by minimizing the value of the data through anonymization and aggregation.
Decentriq’s cloud-based platform enables enterprises to access sensitive data – which falls under GDPR or is strategically important – in a confidential and protected environment. Organisations can also apply external machine learning models to their internal datasets. This enables organizations to manage, analyze and share their data within minutes, without needing to trust a third party, and in compliance with privacy requirements as the data is also encrypted while being in use.
Maximilian Groth, co-founder and CEO of Decentriq, said, “Before Decentriq, if an organisation wished to initiate a data partnership and build up an analytics ecosystem it would usually take months. Say a bank and an insurance company decided to partner and offer products based on their combined datasets, it involves multiple parties, such as the Data Privacy Officer (DPO) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), while a machine learning-enabled infrastructure would be required to handle analytics. Setting this up is time-consuming and very expensive. Decentriq’s fast deployment platform has compliance with privacy requirements built in. It saves hours of work for enterprises and decreases operating costs and therefore supports DPOs, CISOs and Chief Data Officers. Our customers can focus on creating value from their data.”
He added: “We’re excited to continue our growth with the backing of respected investors btov and Paladin. Their support allows us to expand internationally while growing our client base within and beyond the financial services and healthcare industries.”
Andreas Goeldi, partner at btov Partners, commented on the startup: “Data is the essential raw material of the 21st century, and sophisticated machine learning-driven analytics unlock tremendous value from these assets. Decentriq’s solution enables unprecedented collaboration between corporations, sharing cutting-edge models and highly confidential data for the first time in a fully secure way.”
Ken Pentimonti, Principal and European Manager at Paladin Capital Group, said: “Confidential Computing is an emerging approach that enables encrypted data to be processed while lowering the risk of exposure to related systems. This is a paradigm shift for data security in the cloud and offers the potential to remove the remaining barrier to adoption of cloud-based technology for highly regulated businesses. Decentriq is leading the way, and we’re pleased to be backing them.”
Jags Rao, of the Swiss Re – Digital Transformation – New Propositions at Swiss Re, also commented: “It’s crucial to offer data sources maximum privacy and security guarantees, when analyzing external data as part of an ecosystem. Confidential Computing offers a promising time-saving solution for enterprises to benefit from data ecosystems and derive privacy preserving analytics without compromising on sensitive data or trade secrets.”
