- Data privacy infrastructure company Transcend announced that it raised $25 million in Series A funding to make it easier for users to have control over their personal data
Data privacy infrastructure company Transcend announced that it raised $25 million in Series A funding to make it easier for users to have control over their personal data. This round of funding was led by Index Ventures along with Accel and with participation from South Park Commons, Phil Venables (Board Member and former CISO of Goldman Sachs), and Dylan Field (CEO at Figma).
This investment validates the strength of Transcend’s breakthrough technology, strategy, and team. And it positions Transcend to capture the entire data privacy market.
Transcend has built a completely new data privacy infrastructure that integrates into a company’s databases and applications. And it automatically handles requests end-to-end with no human intervention required.
And Transcend co-founders Ben Brook (CEO) and Mike Farrell (CTO) realized there was no easy way for consumers to access their personal data or for companies to easily provide access to that data. The team saw an opportunity to build a data infrastructure that fully manages personal data, no matter where it is stored whether it is databases, SaaS tools, warehouses, vendors, etc.
The data rights movement has been growing and going global. And with regulations like the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California, countries and states are rapidly adopting more stringent requirements around data privacy.
This affects a vast majority of companies — which not only need to maintain compliance from a regulatory standpoint but also need to fulfill increasing numbers of user requests in an efficient and scalable way. And businesses that rely on manual and time-intensive internal processes that involve staff across nearly every business function are struggling to keep up.
Data rights requests are considered one the most difficult of all GDPR obligations. And now as people are moving more and more of their lives online because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for data privacy is more urgent and necessary. It will also continue to be so in the future.
Transcend launched in 2017 and it raised a $4 million seed round in 2019. Transcend had come out of a beta phase in 2019 with several leading customers, including Robinhood and Patreon. Transcend has processed more than 20,000 access, erasure, and opt-out requests to date.
Key Quotes:
“We are defining how modern privacy will work, and how users will interact with their data going forward. Operating on one person’s personal data across hundreds of data systems is extremely complex, but it’s all beneath the hood with Transcend. We distilled this process into something that is so simple for companies to use, they can start offering their users data rights in an afternoon.”
– Ben Brook
“In the wake of dozens of stories about privacy issues on video-conferencing sites, data breaches at retail companies and targeted election ads on Facebook, consumers are increasingly aware and concerned about how their personal data is used, which is pushing government regulators to step up. However, even companies who want to prioritize data privacy can struggle to fulfill requests efficiently and at scale. Transcend solves that problem, empowering users to take control of their data and businesses to stay compliant without any additional work. Privacy will define the next chapter in internet history, and Transcend is becoming a critical part of the story.”
– Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures
“Companies that touch user data must put systems in place to power end-user privacy rights. The best companies aren’t doing so just to tick a compliance box — they see privacy as an important investment in brand and community. Transcend is building a common service for every company to leverage, and they’re on their way to building an important new software category.”
– Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel
“At Robinhood, we empower our customers to take greater ownership of their financial future, and we believe this extends to their personal information. Transcend’s data privacy infrastructure helps facilitate the way we give customers control over their data.”
– Karthik Rangarajan, Head of Security at Robinhood.
