Sarus unleashes the power of safe knowledge sharing
As the debate rises on the use of personal data to protect populations, organizations need to learn how to leverage the full potential of their data without compromising on security and privacy. We are proud to take part in Sarus’ €2M Seed round, alongside Serena Capital — a big step towards helping organizations safely share their data internally and externally.
Enter the arms race
Can you believe it’s been almost a decade since the age of Big Data was announced? Corporates are deep into the arms race. They hire data scientists / analysts in batches, spend millions in pricey software solutions & external consultants… all to collect, organise and leverage the data generated by their business.
With all that, there’s still an issue — and a major one. The easiest way to leverage data is to share it internally or with strategic partners. Think mobility players and municipalities sharing data to optimize urban planning, financial institutions sharing information across business units to deliver more personalised services, healthcare companies putting in common patient data to provide better care and more accurate diagnosis, etc. The potentials are endless.
But sharing data AND protecting user privacy at the same time seems like a contradiction. The risks of mishandling or data leakage are high. In any given bank nowadays, sharing data internally is still a complicated issue requiring complicated protocols.
Enters the Sarus solution, which is working on a technology that allows businesses to share the information contained in their databases without revealing its content. It could completely reshape the way companies collaborate internally but also across industries!
Read also : Health and privacy, can we get both?
Sharing made easy (and safe)
We’ve been looking very closely to the data protection industry for a couple of years now — check out our mapping of 100 startups that manage personal data. When it comes to ensuring data privacy, the current state of technology developments and standards leaves businesses with one of the following options:
- Data destruction (radical) and encryption, which by definition prevent sharing or leveraging the information.
- Anonymized datasets can easily be de-anonymized as soon as they are combined with other datasets. This fun Netflix story makes a great example.
- There is also synthetic data, which consists in artificially generating data to replicate the statistical components of real-world data but without any identifiable information. No risk in leakage but it is unclear if the generated data carries biases or did not capture the valuable patterns that could impact its usefulness.
- And finally there’s differential privacy, the cryptography-inspired method that Sarus is making available for businesses right now.
data governance + powerful tech = privacy + leverage
Sarus lets data scientists and business analysts work on sensitive data without accessing the individual data directly. How so? By creating statistical background “noise”, that blurs the contribution of individuals without altering the general patterns in the dataset. They can carry on their work as usual, from database analyses to complex machine learning training, without risking any sensitive piece of information, and preventing any individual re-identification.
What we love about the tool is how it helps solves the equation :
data governance + powerful tech = privacy + leverage
Businesses & institutions are getting there on data governance. Sarus helps them on the tech side, making it so much easier to ensure privacy with a viable alternative to the “should i double-lock my data before it leaks” dilemma. The team is driven by an ambitious vision of cooperation, where any organization could work on any internal and external dataset, trustfully enabling an era of more personalised services while keeping their assets safe, and keeping private data safe.
What we love about this team
The market is still in the making, and opportunities are strong. We know that Sarus can become a leading partner for data science and privacy teams anywhere. Vincent, Maxime and Nicolas, the 3 founders, are very skilled repeat entrepreneurs, with clear vision and an outstanding ability to deliver. Together they successfully built, developed and sold an Adtech company, already using advanced algorithms and techniques.
The money raised will allow them to build a world-class team of developers, sales and marketers, as well as experts in banking, mobility, telcos, and any industry in dire need for solutions that will allow them to make to most — at last! — of the treasure they have been working on for so long.
We’re very excited to be part of this!
About Xange
As a leading European venture capital firm based in Paris and Munich with €450m under management, XAnge invests in innovative technology companies operating in the digital consumer, enterprise data, fintechs & deeptechs.
We are privileged to work alongside great founders with strong values, of remarkable businesses such as Ledger, Lydia, Odoo, Neolane, Believe Digital, Evaneos, Welcome to the Jungle, Chauffeur Privé/Kapten and many more.
Find out more at www.xange.fr ;)
