Zurich, Switzerland – Decentriq, the enterprise data security expert, today announces a $3.8 million seed round, co-led by btov Partners and Paladin Capital Group and existing investor Atlantic Labs. The investment is intended to drive international growth and to widen the client base. Decentriq minimizes the time and costs for enterprises to establish and maintain sensitive data ecosystems, e.g. when two entities want to share data. As part of the funding round, Ken Pentimonti from Paladin Capital Group will join the Board of Directors.
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.”
Maximilian Groth 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.”
“Data is the essential raw material of the 21st century, and sophisticated machine learning-driven analytics unlock tremendous value from these assets”, said Andreas Goeldi, partner at btov Partners. “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.”
“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.” Jags Rao (Swiss Re – Digital Transformation – New Propositions at Swiss Re).
About Decentriq
Decentriq is a Swiss company registered in 2019 with a mission to enable secure data ecosystems for enterprises. Using the latest advancements in privacy-enhancing technologies, Decentriq is revolutionizing data collaboration. Its software platform bridges the existing trust gap between all data stakeholders (data analysts, data owners and individuals) in a fully secure, seamless and zero-trust manner.
In October 2019, Decentriq co-founded the Confidential Computing Consortium among tech giants such as Alibaba, Google and Microsoft. Confidential computing is the underlying technology of Decentriq’s platform which gives unprecedented guarantees to the participants in the data ecosystem mitigating hurdles around data privacy (GDPR, Cloud Act and Privacy Shield), data security and computational performance.
About btov Partners
btov Partners, founded in 2000, is a European venture capital firm founded and funded by serial entrepreneurs and business angels focussing on industrial technologies and digital leaders of the European economy. The company manages assets of EUR 510 million and examines over 3,000 investment opportunities annually. Past investments include DeepL, Seven Senders, Layer, DeepCode, Neptune.ai, Raisin, SumUp, Volocopter and XING. More information at www.btov.vc/portfolio
About Paladin Capital Group
Paladin Capital Group was founded in 2001 and has offices in Washington DC, New York, London, Luxembourg, and Silicon Valley. As a multi-stage investor, Paladin focuses on companies with technologies, products, and services that meet the challenging global cyber security and digital infrastructure resilience needs for commercial and government customers. Follow the firm on Twitter @Paladincap and visit www.paladincapgroup.com.
About Atlantic Labs
Atlantic Labs, founded in 2013 by Christophe Maire, is an early-stage venture capital investment fund that is based in Berlin, Germany. They seek to back mission driven founders as early as possible, and help them build world leading companies. They are currently active in areas including Digital Health, Future of Work, AI/Machine Learning, Mobility, Industrial Automation, Fintech, Proptech, and Community. More information at https://atlanticlabs.de/
Press Contact
Decentriq: Melina Dimoula, melina.dimoula@decentriq.ch
btov Partners: Andreas Goeldi, +41 79 207 67 81, andreas.goeldi@btov.vc
Paladin Capital Group: Emma Thorpe, ethorpe@paladincapgroup.com, +44 7909 974958
Atlantic Labs: Claudia Koerner, claudia@atlanticlabs.de