This is a press release by STRM Privacy. Please check out strmprivacy.io for more information.
STRM privacy, a Dutch data platform that brings privacy-by-design to data streams, announces a €3 million seed round led by Singular and Data Community Fund, along notable angels like Charles Songhurst and founders from Mendix, Algolia, and Swapfiets.
STRM privacy is a data platform designed around privacy. By deeply integrating data shape, consent and classification, privacy is embedded into data generation instead of as an afterthought.
The STRM privacy founding team firsthand experienced the challenges of embedding privacy into data pipelines and creating value for customers when they worked in research, machine learning and data engineering at e-commerce platform bol.com and food retailer Ahold Delhaize.
“While data privacy regulations serve a great purpose, they add coordination and uncertainty to the development process for data teams and consequently slow them down”, says STRM co-founder Bart Voorn, who was previously Head of R&D at Ahold Delhaize and saw projects being axed for privacy reasons. Together with Pim Nauts, former Machine Learning Lead at bol.com they saw the opportunity to enable organisations to strike a better balance between data innovation and data privacy – and help create more customer value in effect. Voorn: “our goal is to ensure consumers and society can benefit from data innovation without sacrificing privacy”.
His co-founder adds: “We experienced how challenging it is to build for privacy and deliver value at the same time. We’re a data platform designed from privacy forward, not as an afterthought or access problem. With our approach, data teams can “just build” great data products and deserve trust from their customers, leadership and legal teams, and ship quicker and with confidence. This is exactly the simplification we aim to deliver.”
Customers
Use cases for applications share sensitivity in data (such as healthcare and mobility) or a high opportunity cost of being slow to innovate with data, like e-commerce platforms and digital apps. Customers cite the value of centralizing data privacy: fix it once instead of point-to-point, removing the burden of constant coordination between legal and data teams. The team signed their first customers and proof-of-concepts in media and e-commerce, including the Belgium/Dutch publishing house DPG Media. For them, STRM privacy will be the data layer in personalised news feeds for millions of daily users.
“The data needed to build personalization is potentially sensitive even if properly consented. We need to gather high quality data to train and evaluate machine learning models. With STRM Privacy, we can build with confidence to bring recommendations or search to market quickly ” says Anne Schuth, Head of Personalization.
Investors
Raffi Kamber, partner at lead investor Singular, outlines the investment rationale: “There is a big and essential opportunity to help organizations build privacy-by-design, and this team is uniquely positioned to capture that opportunity, with experience in delivering data-driven products in a context where privacy matters greatly. Together with backing from Data Community Fund, seasoned investors such as Charles Songhurst and founders from names like Algolia, Mendix, and Swapfiets we believe this team can turn STRM Privacy into a household name in the data space”.
For more information, please visit strmprivacy.io