Privacy and security should be top of mind for everyone who works with potentially sensitive data, and the population of folks who do so is growing. Most data scientists and analysts don’t own the data they’re working with, and lurid tales of misuse often make data a company’s biggest asset and liability. And, chances are, neither the analysts nor owners have the requisite background to parse legal code into computer code—at least not in a repeatable and scalable way.
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Immuta referees the complex coordination game between data scientists, data owners, and compliance specialists. As a result, today the company is announcing a $20 million Series B round led by DFJ Growth, with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, Citi Ventures, and prior investors Drive Capital and Greycroft.
The D.C.-area company, which was founded in 2014 and spun out of the U.S. intelligence community, has raised $9.5 million in prior funding across two rounds, according to Crunchbase data. Its $8 million Series A round, led by Drive Capital, was announced back in February 2017.
Matthew Carroll, Immuta’s CEO, said his company’s technology could be applied in “any use case where you have regulated data, but want to write algorithms that build models from that data, where the data could change dynamically.”
Through 2016, the company sold its technology exclusively to government clients. However, in 2017, Immuta started selling its platform commercially and grew its revenue more than 260 percent that year, according to the company. Its clients include Orange (the telecoms provider), Barclays Bank, the U.S. intelligence community, and others in insurance, healthcare, and other industries. The company plans to open a number of offices in the coming year, including one in London. Carroll sees promise in that market, remarking, “In Europe, privacy is a right. In the U.S., it’s a sales feature.”
Immuta’s data management system lets data scientists connect their tool of choice to the platform and lets governance professionals write condition-based policies for what data gets shared and how it’s rendered—all so the different stakeholders comply with whatever regulatory, security, and privacy requirements are in place. Data owners can change access rules dynamically, allowing for flexibility when those laws (like GDPR), internal policies, or the underlying data itself change over time.
Carroll further explained that “the law can’t keep pace with technology. As analytics and AI advance faster than any other technology category, the gap between regulation and analytics also increases.” Although many organizations rely on complicated applications to access and analyze their data, regulatory compliance and monitoring remains a manual and cumbersome process which slows down progress in data science teams.
Immuta generates human-readable reports to share in the event of an audit or legal action. The future for Immuta, Carroll elaborated, is to move “beyond ‘explainability’ toward calculating and assessing risks [to data] so companies can make better decisions.”
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