Last summer saw investors and venture capitalists put millions of dollars into the privacy technology market. Securiti.ai was one of the vendors as it closed a round of Series A funding worth $31 million.
As the calendar flipped into 2020 and money continued to fuel privacy tech vendors, Securiti.ai once again was able to obtain a new influx of cash. The vendor announced it has received $50 million in Series B funding, led by venture capital firms General Catalyst and Mayfield.
"What happened is that a lot of investors who are tracking this market looked at us and saw our approach, which is not piecemeal," Securiti.ai President and CEO Rehan Jalil said. "Because of that significant interest, we were able to close it much faster than normal. It took perhaps six to eight weeks for the entire process."
He said the funding will be used to service the customers of its Privaci.ai platform, which uses artificial intelligence and bots to automate compliance tasks, such as conducting privacy impact assessments, gathering consent and assisting with data subject access requests.
Jalil envisions AI and automation to be the future of privacy compliance, and he believes his investors share the same sentiment. The company has now received $81 million in funding over the past couple of months and looks to continue its upswing in 2020 and beyond.
While the company plans to continue to refine its existing offerings and introduce new products, Jalil wants customer support to be a top priority following the funding round.
"We already have offerings that we are selling, and we are going to keep adding to it as part of the regular course of our existing plan. How we create awareness and how we make our customers successful by providing them resources will be the focus of most of our expansion," said Jalil, who added his company will also turn an eye toward reaching areas around the world that plan to adopt new regulations.
Jalil believes one reason his company has attracted investors' attention is the benefits automation can bring to an organization's privacy program.
"Technology needs to understand people’s data, where it resides, how it actually keeps it private and how to give rights to people in the most automated fashion. Not really in a manual way, which not only takes more time, but it is costly and imperfect," Jalil said. "There is a genuine appetite and desire by the enterprise customers to look beyond simple web forms to maintain privacy. There is a market adoption curve coming into play and investors see that. To them technology for technology’s sake means nothing."
The investors who have financed Securiti.ai's recent round of funding will have a hands-on approach to business, according to Jalil. In fact, one of the reasons Jalil is pleased with the deal is the knowledge the investors will be able to bring to the table.
"These are people who have looked at what we are doing and got really excited about it and have voted with their own money," Jalil said. "We took their money not just for money sake. These guys have the intellect, the knowledge and the wisdom that’s going to help us."
As part of the funding news, the vendor also announced it has launched an enhanced version of its DSAR offering. The product uses what Jalil called a "People Datagraph" to scan across the entire organization to gather all the information on the person who is making the request into a profile.
"If a DSAR does come in, it will automatically elect to share information, invite the people who need to review it and automatically create a report, encrypt it and send it to the consumer," Jalil said.
As Securiti.ai makes news, will other companies decide to follow suit and pursue more automated-focused offerings? Jalil said the answer is yes.
"I think it’s going to happen because it’s the right thing to do. We have a lot of techniques that are proprietary, but there are a lot of creative people who can come up with techniques. I think as an industry, automation has to happen," Jalil said. "It has to be data intelligence. It cannot be driven by surveys as the industry stands today with privacy management. It’s just a matter of time before there’s more competition, and I think it’s a good thing in some ways."
Photo by Arthur Mazi on Unsplash
