Decentriq nabs $3.8 Million to boost growth

The confidential data platform Decentriq enables enterprises to access sensitive data. To boost international growth and expand its client base, the startup has secured $3.8 Million in a new financing round led by btov Partners with significant participation from Paladin Capital Group and existing investor Atlantic Labs.

As business models increasingly rely on big data, a major challenge for enterprises is the ability to access and analyse sensitive data at scale and in a secure environment. Data owners on the other hand should be able to decide who uses their data and how. Currently, this is only possible through legal contracts or partly by minimising the value of the data through anonymisation and aggregation.

Using the latest advancements in privacy-enhancing technologies, the enterprise data-security expert, Decentriq has built a cloud-based platform to provide enterprises with access to sensitive data in a confidential and protected environment. The software thus enables companies to easily collaborate with machine learning professionals or apply external machine learning models to their internal datasets. This enables them to manage, analyse and share their data directly within minutes. Data is encrypted allowing for compliance with privacy requirements.

Decentriq is aiming to scale globally. The financial boost of $3.8 million obtained through its new financing round will allow the company to accelerate its internationalisation plans and to grow its client base within and beyond the financial services and healthcare industries. Besides the lead investor, btov Partners, Paladin Capital Group and existing investor Atlantic Labs also made significant contributions to the round.

“Data is the essential raw material of the 21st century, and sophisticated machine learning-driven analytics unlock tremendous value from these assets”, said Andreas Goeldi, partner at btov Partners. “Decentriq’s solution enables unprecedented collaboration between corporations, sharing cutting-edge models and highly confidential data for the first time in a fully secure way.”

Confidential computing as a new paradigm
In October 2019, the startup co-founded the Confidential Computing Consortium among tech giants such as Alibaba, Google and Microsoft. Confidential computing is the underlying technology of Decentriq’s platform, which gives unprecedented guarantees to the participants in the data ecosystem mitigating hurdles around data privacy (GDPR, Cloud Act and Privacy Shield), data security and computational performance. To date, the Zurich-based startup has become a global pioneer in Confidential Computing.

Ken Pentimonti, Principal and European Manager at Paladin Capital Group, said; “Confidential Computing is an emerging approach that enables encrypted data to be processed while lowering the risk of exposure to related systems. This is a paradigm shift for data security in the cloud and offers the potential to remove the remaining barrier to adoption of cloud-based technology for highly regulated businesses. Decentriq is leading the way, and we’re pleased to be backing them.”

(Press release/RAN)