DataTrails (formerly RKVST) is a company that gives creators and businesses long-term confidence in digital files and documents by maintaining a tamper-proof record of who did what when no matter where the files are stored or how they move around. Pulse 2.0 interviewed DataTrails chairman and CEO Rusty Cumpston to learn more about the company.
Rusty Cumpston’s Background
Cumpston has been working on startups for most of his career. And Cumpston said:
“This is startup number seven. I don’t remember who shared the phrase ‘an unnatural affection for chaotic situations,’ but that’s really close to what excites me. There have been varied business pursuits.”
“Two were optical networking companies. ONI Systems, a metro optical networking company, was the first one. That was when I got out to Silicon Valley. It ended up being an amazing success. Along the way, I went from being VP of engineering to chief operating officer and working with Hugh Martin, ONI’s CEO. Then I did another optical networking company: Infinera. I was the engineering leader working with another amazing team and brilliant founders when we built the first high-capacity optical transport system using a photonic IC that was completely designed and manufactured inside the company and then went public.”
“In between those two, I was the CEO of a company called CloudShield, which was a hardware-software platform for deep tech security. CloudShield was bought by a big defense contractor.”
“Then I started two companies. One was Sensity Systems, which was a smart city edge IoT play. Verizon acquired it. And the other is a company Nstream, which is a real-time streaming applications platform. It’s a pretty phenomenal piece of technology for blazing fast UIs and business insights.”
“I also served as the interim CEO at XenSource, which was an open source server virtualization pursuit. XenSource in several ways is similar to what we’re doing now at DataTrails. For one, both companies have a brilliant Cambridge, U.K., software team and a Silicon Valley business team. XenSource was able to attract a great business team and quickly became an alternative to VMware and was acquired by Citrix.”
“At DataTrails, we’re working on another very important technology that will ultimately sit deep inside the technology stack to provide a solution for long-term data integrity. Everybody needs it. But we don’t need hundreds of different ways to do long-term data integrity. There will be a few key providers that offer this technology, it’s going to get used in all kinds of ways, and it’s going to be implemented and available in a standards-based open, interoperable system.”
Formation Of DataTrails
How did the idea for the company come together? Cumpston shared:
“RKVST – now DataTrails – was the vision of the three co-founders, Jon Geater, Krishna Anne, and Rob Brown. I was an investor in Krishna’s prior company, and when he introduced me to Jon, I was immediately ready to invest and provided the first seed check to the company.”
“What Jon described to me was a fundamental need to bring trust back to the internet. When the internet got started, it was used to share pictures of cats. Nobody thought about or cared about this issue of long-term data integrity. But this has been Jon’s vision all along. The market has changed significantly over the past 18 months, including exposing this data integrity issue. When people are talking about ‘the erosion of trust on the internet’, that translates to the lack of long-term data integrity. Today’s integrity metadata is perishable, which is a problem at the root of trust issues and supply chain inefficiencies.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for DataTrails so far? Cumpston reflected:
“Doing startups is always hard. You get to work with brilliant people; they have brilliant ideas. And there’s an element of control in those choices – the people you work with and the ideas you come up with, and then what you do. But what you’re never in control of is the market.”
“The optical networking market exploded when I was at ONI. The world needed what we built. For server virtualization, XenSource was in the right place at the right time and that market exploded. The world needed what we built. Wonderful.”
“What’s happening now reminds me a lot of some of those market dynamics where the thing that we’ve built is now in great demand. And it’s always exciting when that happens.”
“I feel like we’re living that moment now with DataTrails.”
Core Products
What are your company’s core products and features? Cumpston explained:
“I think it’s expressed in our mission statement. We’re aiming to address the erosion of trust issue without requiring people to change the way they work today. I think it’s super important that we enable that. We do this through connectors that allow essential provenance metadata to be automatically created, stored, and made available to people who need it. That’s the power of our Dropbox connector, and we’ll be introducing other connectors soon.”
“We also wanted to make it easy and accessible for developers who are building and enhancing their applications and services to add this long-term integrity capability with a very simple API.”
“We’re delivering on our mission to enable people to receive these long-term data integrity benefits without changing how they work and providing seamless enhancements that turn the tide on the erosion of trust issue.”
Evolution Of DataTrails’ Technology
How has the DataTrails technology evolved since launching? Cumpston noted:
“We started out as an enterprise solution. Today, we’re providing a freemium way for people to immediately start using the product. Anyone anywhere in the world can now access it. Content managers, auditors, supply chain operators and developers can sign up and use the product to start solving provenance issues and building immutable audit trails for documents and files.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Cumpston cited:
“We’ve done multiple successful projects in the nuclear space with the DoD and many other companies. And now what we’re seeing is people are using our product without having to do anything other than come to our website, sign up for an account and use the connectors.”
“We’ve brought in some great investors along the way, who have a lot of experience building successful companies. Some of our key investors are the same investors that were with me at XenSource. We think what we’re working on now at DataTrails will be the biggest thing yet.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Cumpston about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We have the published case study with Sellafield. It’s a great story that talks about why audit trails are so important and how transformational they are for supply chain operations.”
“We are also excited to share more details in the future about the amazing things that we are doing to add immutable audit trails for anything that’s in a Dropbox account.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market size is the company pursuing? Cumpston assessed:
“Estimates indicate there are 4 trillion files that exist across the platforms for which we are introducing connectors. Do all of those files need long-term data integrity? I don’t know. But I’d argue that every file that you’re going to check or use should have long-term integrity because if you don’t know anything about where it came from, who changed it and when it was changed, you can’t know: Was it ever safe to use?”
“The other estimate I’ve seen is there are 150 billion pieces of new content generated every month now. How many of those new files need long-term data integrity? Just 5% of 150 billion is a big number, and if you use the entire 150 billion per month number, the TAM becomes quite large.”
“I think that’s how pervasive this erosion of trust issue is.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates DataTrails from the competition? Cumpston affirmed:
“I expect as standardization work matures, we will see more transparency services like ours in the market.”
“Right now, our intent is to advance the long-term data integrity tech we’ve built to enable everyone to add protection to their content and make it instantly, transparently verifiable whenever that content is accessed.”
“There’s a lot of innovation still to be done in making our DataTrails platform more accessible and more easy to use – both for people to use directly and for applications and machines to integrate as well.”
Future Company Goals
What are some future company goals for DataTrails? Cumpston pointed out:
“Delighting our users and partners, accelerating and eventually new funding.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics to discuss? Cumpston concluded:
“We recently changed our name from RKVST to DataTrails. The RKVST name was a compromise because we couldn’t afford vowels at the time, so we went with the license plate spelling thinking that would work, but in hindsight, I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
“We’ve known for a while that we needed to change the name. As we introduced the first Dropbox connector into the market, the feedback over and over again was that we’re helping people to build immutable audit trails that solve a variety of pain points. Fortunately, the name DataTrails was available, and we’ve made the change.”
“People using our product love it and it is much easier to understand what we do, who we serve, and the new name DataTrails has vowels and can be easily spelled.”
