Privitar raises $16 million to ensure privacy in Big Data Analytics

Privitar, a ‘privacy engineering’ company has raised $16 million to ensure data privacy in big data Analytics. The UK based startup is building tools to help organizations keep that data private and has picked up $16 million in funding to expand its tech platform and take its business to the US market.

Data Protection, i.e., a set of laws and practices created across different markets to ensure that our sensitive information does not get leaked or shared without our permission, is already being called on for in many countries. Especially in the UK, it continues to gain priority in our rapidly expanding digital world. Privitar wants to ensure that the privacy of data used for analytics is ensured.

“Often what people mean by ‘anonymised’ is that they’ve marked out basic identifiers, but as data becomes more complex there are other identifiers within the data that can be used to pinpoint a user, even without basics like name and date of birth, such as location,” said CEO and co-founder of Privitar,Jason du Preez. “That is the problem we have solved, with methods that analyse the data and expose the holes.”

The funding, which was a series A round was led by French based Partech Ventures with strategic participation from CME Ventures (the investing arm of derivatives marketplace CME) and, interestingly, Salesforce Ventures.The previous investors of the company, IQ Capital, 24Haymarket and Illuminate Financial also participated also participated in the funding. This brought the total raised by two year-old Privitar to around $21 million.

“Data-driven decision making and intelligence is becoming critical for all businesses. Firms cannot afford to compromise on privacy protection given the potential consequences to brand and reputation,” said Jean-Marc Patouillaud, managing partner for Partech Ventures. “We have decided to invest in Privitar because we see them as an excellent option for organisations that want to get the most of their data while ensuring full customer trust.”