Our Investment in Opaque Systems — Building the Future of Data Analytics
It was a beautiful but cold evening in 2013 when I first met Ion Stoica at Cavallo Point. His idea of Spark for data analytics in the cloud intrigued me. I was impressed by Ion’s vision and the ambition of the AMPLab (which stands for “Algorithms, Machines, and People”.) From that first meeting, I then went on to have the pleasure of advising and working with Ion and Ali Ghodsi for their remarkable Databricks Journey. To this date, my conversations and brainstorming with them never disappoints.
I am fortunate enough to reenact the Cavallo Point meeting in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic except this time, Ion brought along a new group of remarkably smart people! The AMP Lab has now been reincarnated as the UC Berkeley RISELab and the new project is called MC2. We, at Race Capital, have been working with Ion, Raluca, Rishabh, Chester and Wenting since day one, where they have already released the earliest iteration of the core open source components of Opaque as MC2 — a multi-party collaboration and coopetition project (https://github.com/mc2-project).
I am therefore thrilled to announce our seed investment in Ion’s next venture — Opaque Systems. Opaque Systems will redefine how the world analyzes encrypted data in the cloud by building a full stack data infrastructure platform to enable businesses to do secure analytics on the cloud by computing unseen & classified (encrypted) data.
Today, massive amounts of sensitive data comes from diverse sources with no common schema and is of variable quality. The current limitations of sharing sensitive data has led to many of the world’s challenges including data breaches, security exploits, hacks, loss of personal privacy, compromised medical records, compromised voter information, and many others. Opaque will empower every single data scientist within companies to be able to do computation across datasets, but never have access to the underlying data itself, thus guarding both consumer data protections and helping enterprises safeguard their most important assets.
This technology would accelerate the transition of all types of sensitive data to the cloud while at the same time providing assurances to businesses that all data policies are being compliantly followed (PII, health data, financial data, etc).
New laws like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), have created anxiety among companies who employ big data analytics. With Opaque, companies would be able to collaborate together without the worry of sharing or leaking proprietary information ever again. This would have major impacts across all industries including: financial services, healthcare, life sciences, government, insurance, advertising, and many others.
Opaque will be critically important for a whole host of use-cases and sectors including: anti-money laundering, compliance, risk assessment, healthcare analytics (especially applicable during COVID), data privacy, security, insurance underwriting, and many broadly adoptable use cases. Being able to do secure analytics on data you cannot get access to, will open up a whole new set of applications and business models to be built on top of it.
I believe Ion, Raluca, Rishabh, and the Opaque team will redefine how secure data analytics should be done and will open up huge opportunities and unlock a market worth trillions of dollars. Their expertise in this area will change the way we utilize data in the future and we’re excited to partner with the exceptional Opaque team in driving this incredible platform.
