PrivacyTech startup, PrivaSapien, raises INR ~8 crore (USD 1M) in seed funding round led by Omidyar Network India

The 2021 Winner of Aatmanirbhar Bharat’s ANIC-ARISE Challenge by NITI Aayog, will focus on accelerating sales, research, product development and market expansion

PrivaSapien, an award-winning privacy engineering deep tech startup, has raised INR ~ 8 crore (USD 1 million) in a seed round funding from Omidyar Network India. PrivaSapien is a B2B privacy engineering company that helps businesses visualize privacy risk, mitigate it, and thus unlock the value of data and derive strategic business insights, without violating user privacy.

One of the biggest challenges faced by companies today is responsibly sharing data with business partners and limiting the use of that data for approved uses only, so that consumer privacy is protected. Companies across the globe increasingly face these sorts of concerns due to emerging privacy regulations and business requirements. PrivaSapien, founded by Abilash Soundararajan and Deepika Abilash, offers targeted solutions to companies to handle these privacy requirements, all of which is built on its advanced patented technologies.

PrivaSapien’s products have applications across sectors and are being currently used in industries handling sensitive personal data like healthcare, finance, telco & connected devices where analytics or cross-border data transfer play a key role. PrivaSapien is working with global technology partners in areas like cloud, consulting & system integration to creating a global & population scale impact. Its products help in compliance with global privacy compliance requirements like EU’s GDPR, US’ HIPAA Privacy rule, California’s CPRA, India’s draft DPDP bill and Singapore’s PDPA.

“With privacy regulations coming up across the world, there is a pressing need for privacy engineering solutions to unlock data from their silos and create value, without violating user privacy. We will be using the funds to ramp up our research and product development in this emerging field, along with accelerating our sales and marketing efforts in geographies with privacy regulations across the globe.” says Abilash Soundararajan, Founder & CEO, PrivaSapien.

One of PrivaSapien’s  key products, Privacy X-Ray is an automated privacy audit tool that assesses privacy risk in a dataset, thereby reducing the time taken in the process from a few weeks to a few minutes. It also provides intelligent recommendations to mitigate the risk & meet compliance requirements. Its second tool, Event Horizon, offers automated anonymization of a dataset to ensure privacy protected handling of data. In the process of anonymization, the tool is able to retain  about 85% more of business insights compared to other contemporary methods like tokenization and masking, while also preventing the re-identification.

“Given our ongoing focus on privacy-tech as an investor, we are delighted to see the evolution of market-led models like PrivaSapien. The work that Abhilash and team are doing will help businesses to enhance the privacy and safety of their customers in the digital economy. This is especially critical as more and more Indians come online. We are proud to partner with PrivaSapien who has taken on this mission through an innovation-first lens to help businesses adopt privacy preserved data handling.”, says Shilpa Kumar, Partner, Omidyar Network India

For its work in privacy-preserved healthcare data collaboration, Privasapien (formerly TruthShare) was declared one of the winners of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat’s ANIC-ARISE Challenge by NITI Aayog and was awarded a grant-aid for the same. PrivaSapien has also won national Privacy Application Challenge 2021 conducted by Data Security Council of India (DSCI), for privacy due diligence & purpose limitation. PrivaSapien has filed 5 patents in the area of Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 4 of which were recently published.