The Data Privacy Revolution is Here, and DataGrail Raised $45M to Accelerate it. Buckle Up — This is Just the Beginning

It’s been a whirlwind of a year.  

We’ve doubled our customer count, adding amazing brands like Salesforce, New Balance, Instacart, Skillshare, and MyFitnessPal to our expansive list of customers. We’ve rounded out our executive team with some of the best tech leaders in the business — Cathy Polinsky as our CTO, and Sam East as our CRO. Also on the hiring front, we doubled the number of employees. We now have more than 100 team members, and that number will only go up over the next several months as DataGrail aggressively scales to help companies overcome their data privacy challenges. Additionally, we launched new products and built a thriving, educational privacy community to assist organizations of all sizes in their efforts to adopt best practices. 

And today, I’m excited to say we’ve landed an additional $45M in funding to deliver on our vision of helping people take ownership over their privacy and identity. Third Point Ventures led the round, with participation from Thomson Reuters Ventures and Sixty Degree Capital. All our previous investors — Felicis Ventures, Operator Collective, Next47, Cloud Apps Capital, and others — participated as well. And we are thrilled that Third Point Ventures Partner Dan Moskowitz has joined our Board of Directors.

A Privacy Awakening

Our funding couldn’t come at a more relevant time. Privacy is a human right, but in some corners of the world — including here in the U.S. — privacy is under assault, and people realize it. People are demanding more control over their privacy — in fact eight out of every 10 Americans believe there should be a federal regulation protecting their privacy. In absence of a law, people are taking action to protect their personal data online: deleting their cookies, revoking consent, using Apple’s App Tracking Transparency functionality, and exercising their privacy rights given to them via CCPA and GDPR. 

In response to people’s (i.e. voters’) demands, many states are passing data privacy laws similar to CCPA to make up for the lack of federal regulation. And penalties are starting to roll out for companies that fail to respond to consumer requests or that are lax in the handling of personal information. For example, California recently settled with Sephora, wielding its power under CCPA, fining them for not giving consumers the opportunity to opt-out of their data being shared, which resulted in multiple damaging headlines in the press. 

At DataGrail we’ve never seen so much demand for our products. Brands want to do right by their customers, employees, and the community because they know that a trusted brand is a loved brand. When people feel like their data is in good hands, they are more willing to shop, share, and interact. Brands that treat privacy as a first-class citizen will win customer loyalty in the decade ahead. 

Helping Brands for the Good of All

But getting data privacy right is hard. 

Privacy isn’t something that happens overnight. It requires dedication, ongoing commitment, and a partner to help sort through the messy stuff. DataGrail is a partner to brands — their privacy control center — so they can build powerful privacy programs and seamlessly collaborate with their colleagues to evangelize good privacy practices.

Our newly launched product Risk Monitor reduces the workload on day-to-day users with intelligent workflows and pre-populated documentation pulled from our deep integration network. It unpacks the legalese so teams can take action quickly — like when a company is required to complete a risk assessment, a DPIA or PIA or any third-party assessments. (If you could use a little help understanding your third-party risk, come to our launch event where we’ll be unveiling Risk Monitor and all its capabilities.)

And we will continue to drive innovation forward to make data privacy management seamless for organizations so that they can fully respect their customers’ rights and preferences without fail.

I couldn’t be more proud of the team who got us here today. They’ve worked tirelessly to build a company that ensures everyone has access to their fundamental right to privacy. If privacy as a human right is an important issue to you, we’re hiring in all departments. Come join us.