Back in May, the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) shook email inboxes all over the world. Companies, in an effort to comply with the new EU data regulations, wanted to make sure that all of their customers were aware of their compliance with the new law.
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At that time, a startup called DataGrail, which calls itself “Privacy as a Service,” was in its fourth month as a company. Today it is announcing $4 million in new capital. Cloud Apps Capital Partners led the round, with participation by Gunderson Dettmer. This is the first capital raise for the young startup, which is currently valued at $16 million.
Founded by a team with experience in software development, data science, and marketing, the company aims to help enterprises stay compliant with privacy regulations. GDPR enables European citizens to both request information as well as the deletion of their information from systems. Per the GDPR guidelines, those requests must be completed within 30 days of submission. The challenge is that many companies host customer data in various systems across various teams, and one request might mean deleting information stored in different databases.
“With our collection of experiences, we realized that given the sheer number of applications that are managing customer data today […] it’s practically impossible for [businesses] to adhere to that guideline for European individuals,” DataGrail’s Co-founder and CEO Daniel Barber told Crunchbase News.
DataGrail integrates with support and marketing systems like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Marketo through direct APIs. As a result, DataGrail collects, processes, and completes customer requests, retrieving and deleting all information. Barber said that the company builds about one new integration a day, with over 50 integrations at the time of writing.
The company also manages the unsubscribe portals for individuals by sending a communication preference card to individuals who have requested to unsubscribe from a specific company email.
Datagrail also believes there’s potential business in domestic regulations as well. With the recent passing of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which will go into effect in January 2020, the company anticipates that more enterprises will seek the kind of service DataGrail offers in order to ramp up for its implementation. Further, the company believes that as more data regulations like GDPR and the CCPA emerge in the future, the need for its services will grow and involve other verticals beyond SaaS.
“I think we will gradually begin speaking with more and more consumer companies, given that you and I will start to have more transparency into how our data is being used,” Barber expressed.
Datagrail expects to have 10 customers by the end of the year and about 30 by the end of 2019. It charges based on the number of integrations a customer needs and how many individuals its customers manage.
With the funds the company plans to invest heavily in its engineering, marketing, and customer success headcount, while also hiring across the board over the next year.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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