Privacy breaches are not only bad for consumers, but also expensive for technology companies. For example, GDPR fines now total $1.7 billion, and earlier this year Twitter had to pay $150 million for violating the security and privacy of user data. Based in Pune, India and Delaware, Privado wants to make it easier for developers to keep user data under wraps.
The company today announced that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capita India and Insight Partners. Private Fund and Emergent Fund, which led Privado’s $3.5 million seed round in January 2022, also returned for the new funding.
Privado’s Series A will allow it to grow its technology, grow its team to 25 people, and grow its open source community. He’s after revenue and has signed six-figure contracts. Its pricing model is based on the number of code repositories or products it scans and tracks.
Privado currently manages over 600,000 code files and its clients include Here.com, Thrasio and Zego. It was founded last year by Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan and Vaibhav Antill, who previously worked in the product and engineering teams. After interviewing the product and engineering teams at an e-commerce company, they were inspired to launch Privado to learn how data usage changed with each new software release.
The founders told TechCrunch in an email that “the first step to complying with any privacy laws is gaining visibility into how personal information is collected, used and shared across thousands of apps and services (Netflix popularly has over 1,000 services) empowering the tech company.” Although companies find this a great practice, in reality, it is close to impossible to maintain visibility when code changes are made every week.
He also pointed out that many of the tools currently on the market are not manually scaled and become obsolete as a product changes, or automated tools only focus on knowing where data is stored. Potential to avoid issues around data collection, use, sharing and breaches of personal data.
“There are a lot of privacy technology companies out there today and some of them have raised big rounds like OneTrust, BigID,” said Pravado CEO Antill. “Current tools are kept outside the development lifecycle because decisions are made around data collection, use and sharing.”
Privado addresses these issues with source code management tools, including GitHub and PrivacyCode. It can monitor data usage, detect data flows, and notify developers of privacy issues, including excessive user privileges or data logging.
“Think of it as a grammar for your code,” say the founders. “We give you a data privacy score for existing products and point out privacy and data security issues when writing new code.”
He also created a free tool for Android developers that generates Play Store data security reports for use by developers, including Automate and Blinkist. Privado is now expanding it to an open source privacy coding project.
“We tell engineers to build code and ship features quickly, and we tell them they’re responsible for privacy,” Antill said. “If we’re going to give them tools to increase engagement, we need to give them tools to increase privacy at the same time.”
