Phaselab
We are excited to announce our partnership with Josh Schwartz and David van Dokkum from Phaselab, a new cloud-based software platform to help businesses automate their data privacy issues. We are leading the pre-seed investment in Phaselab to enable stronger consumer protection through a modern, developer-friendly privacy management tool.
One of the most subtle, yet transformative, changes of the past decade is the ever-evolving relationship between businesses, consumers, and privacy. Both in the United States and abroad, privacy has shifted from an afterthought into a necessity. The increasing number of privacy violations and data breaches — up fourfold since 2012 — has spurred a number of regulations that are impacting businesses of all sizes and billions of consumers. Europe first paved the way with the passage of the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, which has fundamentally redefined how companies engage with consumer data. In the U.S., several states have passed comprehensive privacy legislation, and Congress is currently assessing the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, which would represent the country’s first federal framework for data security and digital privacy. Undoubtedly, with the advent of generative AI and an increasingly digital world, questions of privacy will continue to dominate the workflows of businesses worldwide.
Source: https://iapp.org/resources/article/us-state-privacy-legislation-tracker/
The current patchwork of local, national and international regulations have become an operational and monetary headache for enterprises. For one, the existing privacy management tools have not kept up with the evolving set of data privacy obligations. Businesses are balancing the need to protect their customers’ information with the ability to innovate and scale. As tech investors, this is a conundrum we see with a lot of startups and scaled companies that directly or indirectly engage with customer data. Ultimately, we believe that the best businesses must do right by their customers and safeguard their personal information, without sacrificing innovation and product development. That means privacy protection must complement the work of engineers and product leaders, not detract from it; in other words, privacy compliance must be built into the back-end systems that power their business.
That’s exactly what Josh and David have set out to accomplish. Phaselab, which comes out of stealth today, is the first privacy automation platform built for legal and product teams. The platform offers a software-enabled solution to automate data privacy processes, starting with the lifecycle of data retention and deletion. Businesses with high data-retention requirements — think healthcare, finance or legal services — can set retention periods for different data types and automate the data deletion process in accordance with the latest regulations and policies. In addition, Phaselab helps businesses stay ahead of fast-changing regulations by providing compliance analytics and reporting tools.
We believe Josh and David bring a wealth of operational and technical expertise to Phaselab. The duo first met at Chartbeat, where they built data products together for more than five years. Throughout their careers, they experienced first-hand the shortcomings of current privacy management infrastructure. Oftentimes, solving critical privacy problems requires building custom software in-house for managing consumer data — a state of affairs that is bad for both consumers and businesses. As product leaders, Josh and David possess a unique vantage point into the pain points that businesses grapple with as they attempt to keep up with rising privacy laws.
We believe privacy and consumer rights are at the heart of the next wave of digital transformation, and we are confident Phaselab can play a central role in creating the modern infrastructure for managing customer data. We couldn’t be more proud to support Josh and David as they help businesses make good on their privacy promises.
