Violation of privacy not only harms users, but also costs tech companies. Example: GDPR is currently penalized total 1.7 billion dollarsand earlier this year Twitter to pay 150 million dollars for misrepresenting the security and privacy of user data. Headquartered in Pune, India and Delaware, Privado wants to make it easier for developers to manage user data.
The company announced today that it has raised $14 million in a Series A fund led by Sequoia Capita India and Insight Partners. The Together Fund and the Emerging Fund, which led the $3.5 million Privado seed round in January 2022, have also returned to receive new funding.
Privado’s A-series will allow it to grow its technology, grow its team to 25, and grow its open source community. It was after sales and signed a six-figure contract. Its pricing model is based on the number of code or product repositories it scans and monitors.
Privado currently tracks more than 600,000 code commits and its customers include Here.com, Thrasio and Zego. It was founded last year by Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan and Vaibhav Antil, who previously worked in product and engineering teams. They were motivated to launch Privado after interviewing the product and engineering teams at an e-commerce company that needed to find a way to track data usage and how it changed with each new software release. .
The founders told TechCrunch in an email that “to comply with any privacy laws, the first step is to gain visibility into how personal data is being collected, used, and shared.” over thousands of apps and services (Netflix famously has more than 1,000) power a tech company. Even if companies achieve this huge mandate, it’s practically impossible to keep showing up as code changes take place on a weekly basis. “
They add that many of the current tools on the market are manual tools that don’t scale and become obsolete as soon as there is a product change, or automated tools that focus solely on discovering where data is located. stored, opening the possibility of lack of issues around data collection, use, sharing and leakage of personal data.
“There are many security technology companies in existence today and some of them have raised big funds like OneTrust, BigID,” said Antil, CEO of Privado. “Current tools are in short supply because they are outside the development lifecycle, where decisions about data collection, use, and sharing are made.”
Privado solves these problems with source code management tools including GitHub and code scanning for security. It can monitor data usage, identify data flows, and notify developers of privacy issues, including excessive user privileges or data leaks into logs.
“Think of us as the Grammarly for your code,” the founders say. “We give you data security scores for existing products and point out data privacy and security issues as you write new code.”
It also makes a free tool for Android developers to generate Play Store data safety reports used by developers, including Automattic and Blinkist. Privado is currently expanding it into an open source secure code canned project.
“We ask engineers to build code and ship features quickly, and we tell them they are responsible for privacy,” Antil said. “If we give them tools to increase engagement, we should also give them tools to increase privacy at the same time.”
