Integral – an innovator in safeguarding privacy and maximizing data quality – recently announced it raised a $6.9 million seed round to protect sensitive health data and provide automated expert certification software enabling health and life sciences companies to access compliant de-identified data in hours rather than months. Haystack, The General Partnership, and Virtue Ventures led this seed round of funding, with additional support from Also Capital, Array Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures, and Venrex.
Integral is backed by experts in healthcare and technology, including the advisors to the company: Jason Brenner, Regional Vice President for Healthcare and Life Sciences at LiveRamp, and Dr. Bradley Malin, Vice Chair for Research and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. And angel investors in the company include Andrew Arruda, co-founder and CEO at Flexpa; Abhishek Chandra, co-founder and CEO at Recora Health; Joel Jewitt, co-founder and Vice President at LiveRamp; Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO at Airbyte; Sam Whitaker, founder and CEO at Mural Health; and others.
Launched by Shubh Sinha, CEO and John Kuhn, CTO, Integral streamlines dataset creation by automating the de-identification and compliance certification process. Personal healthcare data like medical records, health histories, and genetic information – when combined with non-healthcare data such as social media activity, purchasing history, and location data – give researchers a deep, holistic understanding of a person’s health and lifestyle. Even though this combined data set enhances healthcare research and improves health outcomes, it can pose a significant threat to people’s privacy by potentially exposing sensitive information about individuals.
Sinha and Kuhn had created Integral with a shared vision: Empower healthcare companies to work with healthcare data at unprecedented speed by de-identifying and certifying data through automation. And before Integral, companies were forced to rely on expert certifications conducted by consultants. This manual human-led process often took several months and left usable data on the table. Integral provides higher quality data and expert Certification-as-a-Service software, enabling customers to work with better data in nearly real-time.
The company brought on highly experienced healthcare expert Timothy Nobles – who brings over 18 years of experience in large-scale, privacy-preserving data solutions in Healthcare and FinTech. And Nobles will bolster commercial efforts as Integral broadens and scales go-to-business capabilities in its key markets and further develops proprietary platform capabilities with this new round of funding.
KEY QUOTES:
“Combining healthcare and non-healthcare data can transform healthcare research and innovation. John and I asked why healthcare companies couldn’t buy and analyze data as quickly as retailers like Target or Walmart, and we’ve made that possible with Integral. We’ve proven and will continue to prove that speed, accuracy, and privacy can be treated equally, even when working with highly regulated data. We created Integral to achieve this goal, ensuring personal information is protected and people’s privacy rights are respected. By prioritizing privacy and building trust with the public, researchers can unlock more value from data, which leads to better clinical trials, medications, products, technologies, and more.”
— Shubh Sinha, CEO
“Integral addresses a critical need for data privacy automation within life sciences and healthcare organizations, and we see this as a core workflow for these large customers over the coming years. By streamlining privacy compliance, Integral enables companies to operate with data safely and expediently, which helps them get new treatments to market faster and serve patients better.”
— Aashay Sanghvi, Partner, Haystack
“We are seeing incredible momentum for adoption of LLM in regulated industries like healthcare. Skyflow’s data privacy vault offers a complete data privacy layer for LLMs. Our partnership with Integral allows our customers to get expert certification in days rather than weeks and months.”
— Amruta Moktali, Chief Product Officer at Skyflow, an Integral partner
