The London-based startup Privitar, a leading data privacy platform provider announced that it completed an $80 million Series C funding round. This was led by Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm focused on growth investing with participation from Accel, Partech, IQ Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and ABN AMRO Ventures. The investment comes less than a year after a $40 million Series B funding round led by Accel in June 2019.
With this funding, Privitar looks to develop its data privacy platform, which allows businesses to use and store data securely and privately. As data has become incredibly valuable, it has also been left vulnerable, making collecting and storing data a risky business.
For example, Privitar embeds invisible watermarks into protected data, so if any of the data is distributed without consent it can be easily trailed back to the liable party. The company also offers privacy engineering features for de-identification, which takes into account the circumstances in which the data will be accessed. This is useful when companies want to control which employees or third parties can access specific sets of data and ensure they can’t enter other data sets that could be used in a “linkage attack.”
The company also will use the funding to fuel continued innovation, focus on global expansion, and increase its workforce across sales, services, product development, and other teams. In the last year, it grew its global team by 80% while tripling its annual recurring revenue year over year.
“The Privitar platform enables our customers to unlock and use their data to create better products and services while minimizing friction and risk,” said Jason du Preez, CEO of Privitar. “Large enterprises in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare have been early adopters of data privacy solutions, but all companies should look for ways to use data more safely and more effectively. Managing sensitive data at enterprise scale and complexity is a real challenge for even the most sophisticated data organizations. By automating the enforcement of data protection strategies, Privitar’s platform makes this achievable in any data-driven organization. We are excited to partner with Warburg Pincus as we continue to pioneer the category.”
Warburg Pincus is a leading global private equity firm with notable expertise in venture capital and growth investing. The firm has invested over $17 billion in technology companies since its inception and is one of the most active growth investors in cybersecurity. These investments include CrowdStrike, Contrast Security, and BitSight.
