Network analytics-based data discovery startup 1touch.io today emerged from stealth with $14 million in funding. The company, whose products are designed to help enterprises automatically and continuously identify repositories that process, store, and share sensitive information, plans to use the funding principally for platform development and customer acquisition.
On the whole, enterprises often struggle to keep sensitive data away from prying eyes. A 2019 survey commissioned by Egress found that 83% of security professionals believe employees have exposed customer or business data at their organization through email, file-sharing services, collaboration tools, and messaging apps. These are costly mistakes — fines for violating GDPR, one of the widest-ranging privacy regulations, are upwards of $22.5 million, or 4% of a group’s annual global revenue.
1touch purports to prevent this using a combination of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Its Inventa platform discovers things like network and app analytics, file systems, databases, individual files (including PDFs, Word documents, and images), folders, and cloud APIs and analyzes them using a family of proprietary algorithms. The platform inventories the various data lineages into a master catalog, which IT admins can use for privacy regulation, risk management, security, and data governance.
1touch says its system works with data in motion and at rest, structured and unstructured, and within home-grown and off-the-shelf apps. Instead of relying on an organization’s knowledge of the existence or location of data, it “reads and understands” data, linking the pieces in a graph represented as a personally identifiable information (PPI) inventory and the aforementioned catalog.
Inventa correlates personal data and related data (e.g., browsing, history, and transactions) to allow for what it claims is a “more accurate” picture of people’s data and behavior. Thanks to this approach, searches within the catalog for unique identifiers pull up related information, like its location and usage, and multiple locations of unique PPI are automatically merged into one.
1touch.io also provides a ticketing system that autonomously responds to requests for data from customers. It links to the catalog via an API, and it allows authorized parties to dispute, delete, or change data as they like.
The 33-person, three-year-old company has offices in Israel, where it was founded, and the U.S. National Grid Partners and Jerusalem Venture Partners contributed to 1touch.io’s funding round. It brings 1touch.io’s total raised to $16 million, at least a portion of which will be spent on growing its workforce to 65 by 2021.
1touch.io competes with well-funded startups in the $120 billion data protection market. In May, Dathena raised $12 million for its AI solution that monitors and classifies sensitive enterprise data. Compliance startup OneTrust recently nabbed $210 million at a $2.7 billion valuation. And Bitglass raked in $70 million to monitor and secure employee devices by classifying corporate data.
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