Privado, a data security startup, raised $14 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India and New York-based fund Insight Partners. Existing investors Together Fund and Emergent Ventures also participated in the investment round.
The new funding comes just a few months after Privado received $3.5 million in seed funding in January. The funds will help grow the team, enhance Privado’s technology stack, and expand the open-source community.
“Privado has created an intuitive platform that allows data and engineering teams to ensure all development changes are privacy compliant in real-time. With its experienced team, Privado has made a name for itself in the DevSecOps space,” said Nikhil Sachdev, managing director at Insight Partners.
The startup assists in plugging data breach
Privado was founded in 2020 by Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan, and Vaibhav Antil to address enterprise privacy concerns. The company offers an open-source code scanning tool for privacy that recognizes data consumption, discovers data flows and alerts users to issues such as overly permissive users or data leaks to logs.
In recent years, privacy breaches have affected users and proven to be costly for businesses. Twitter was fined $150 million earlier this year for misrepresenting the security and privacy of user data. The fines for violating the General Data Protection Regulation total $1.7 billion.
Privado, based in Pune, India and Delaware, wants to make it easier for developers to keep user data private. Its founding team has previously led tech company product and engineering teams. Privado claims to have resolved over 600,000 privacy solutions for companies such as Thrasio and Zego.
“Current tools fall short because they sit outside the development lifecycle where decisions on data collection and sharing are made,” said Vaibhav Antil, cofounder and CEO at Privado.
According to one report, India’s data security industry is expected to reach $21 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 16 percent between 2020 and 2025.
Considering the country’s stance on data protection, the Centre has yet to introduce a new data protection bill. The government repealed the Personal Data Protection Bill 2021 earlier this month after a joint parliamentary committee proposed 81 amendments. Under the novel data bill, the central government is said to be establishing a grievance redressal mechanism for distressed individuals.
