Highlights –

  • Privya’s scanner examines how sensitive data is handled in code, identifies the different categories of data being collected and how they are utilized, stored, and transferred to third-party services.
  • The firm connects with a company’s CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that poor data handling procedures never end up in a build and providing developers with concrete steps to address problems.

Privya, a data privacy code scanning platform, announced that it had come out of stealth today with a six-million-dollar investment for its data privacy code scanning technology. Together with several angel investors, Hyperwise Ventures led the seed round.

With organizations, applications and AI models handling more and more personal information, governments have developed new data protection laws like the EU General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act. The US Congress intends to pass further federal privacy regulations. Breaking these regulations can be a costly affair. The FTC fined Facebook five billion dollars in the US, and GDPR fines of 1.2 billion were issued in 2021. However, despite spending millions of dollars and completing most of the work by hand, organizations fail to implement complicated legal privacy requirements and reporting systems at the engineering level. The development of privacy technologies is a result of this.

Uzy Hadad, Co-founder and CEO of Privya, said, “Existing privacy solutions focus on private information once it’s already deployed in production, but this can leave organizations exposed and lead to expensive attempts to correct the issue. Cybersecurity has shown us there are better ways; shifting left and stopping bad practices during development, so they never make it to production at all.”

Privya identifies problems and violations with data protection early in the development phase. Privya’s scanner examines how sensitive data is handled in code. It identifies the different categories of data being collected and how they are utilized, stored, and transferred to third-party services. The firm integrates with a company’s CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that poor data handling procedures never end up in a build and providing developers with concrete steps to address problems. The platform builds a thorough mapping of each service to provide total visibility into how an application manages sensitive or personal data.

Privya offers a robust and practical privacy management wizard that makes it simple to add to an ongoing project. It also provides visual features like privacy management dashboards. It identifies sensitive data protection risks (e.g., if personal information is written to logs). It ensures that the information is used only for purposes that abide by the company’s privacy policies.

Nathan Shuchami, the Managing Partner of Hyperwise Ventures, said, “Privacy technology is becoming as important as cybersecurity, and for the same reasons: if you can’t handle people’s personal information responsibly, you’re risking both your reputation and your profits. We were impressed by Privya’s developer-first approach to privacy that matches the realities of modern software development and by the experienced founders who are making their vision a reality. We’re proud to invest in Privya.”

Uzy Hadad, Co-founder, and CEO of Privya, said, “Privacy and data protection are among the biggest challenges of our time, and with big data and machine learning using larger and larger quantities of personal data, keeping sensitive and personal information protected is getting both harder and more urgent. Effective regulations are a great start, but they aren’t enough. Privya’s solution bridges the gaps between a company’s Data Protection Officer, Risk and Compliance Officer, and CISO on the one side and their engineering teams on the other, protecting users’ privacy in cloud applications before code is deployed in production, thus preventing punitive fines for breaches.”