Soveren Lands Star-Studded $6.5M Seed Round, Including 11 Unicorn Founders, to Fight Privacy Incidents

Today Soveren announced a $6.5M seed round, led by firstminute capital and joined by Northzone, 11 unicorn founders, and a group of global CEOs. The founders of Airbnb, Datadog, MuleSoft, Snyk, and Color invested alongside Sir Richard Branson’s family, the Chairman CEO of Palo Alto Networks, and others.

“Soveren is addressing one of the key technology challenges of the decade: privacy and compliance for Engineering teams. Their product provides CTOs, CISOs, and Privacy Engineers with easy-to-use tools to detect and address privacy gaps. The calibre of their seed round speaks to the pedigree of founders, and to the size of the task ahead,” said Spencer Crawley, Co-Founding General Partner of firstminute capital.

Holly Branson, Virgin’s Chief Purpose and Vision Officer said: “At Virgin, our customers mean everything to us and treating them with respect and with world class service is at the core of the entire Virgin ethos. The way we handle their personal information is an important extension of this and something we take very seriously. As a family we are delighted to be investors in Soveren, whose mission and innovative technology will enable many more businesses to become better stewards of personal data.”

10 million companies globally are at risk of violating GDPR and other regulatory obligations because of their failure to detect and resolve privacy incidents and risks. Security software successfully addresses security threats, but has a limited impact on addressing privacy challenges. This is because — unlike other confidential data that can be easily isolated and sealed — personal data is actually meant to be accessed, used, and shared in-day-to-day business operations.

Soveren believes that, if security teaches us anything, privacy has to be embraced by engineering because legal measures alone can’t guarantee compliance. We are already witnessing that Engineering and Security teams in many companies are joining forces with Privacy professionals. However, there is a significant need for purpose-built privacy tools in order to implement continuous and automated privacy incident detection and remediation.

“Privacy is the new Security. Engineering and Security teams demand automated, functional, and easy-to-install privacy solutions as their bandwidth for anything else is severely limited. Soveren provides the much needed simplicity in privacy compliance,” stated Peter Fedchenkov, Founder and Co-CEO of Soveren.

Soveren's technology fills a void in Privacy. It strengthens existing security measures and provides protection from financial and brand damage caused by privacy incidents. Privacy incidents include allowing an undetected API to access personal data or storing personal data in systems which were not designed to keep it safe. These incidents and others are fully preventable with Soveren.

Soveren analyzes real-time data flows inside the company’s infrastructure to discover personal data and detect privacy risks. Soveren is taking the lead on providing CTOs, CISOs, and Privacy Engineers with simple yet effective solutions to resolve privacy incidents via actionable intelligence into the personal data used in day-to-day business operations.

"From my experience working with MuleSoft customers, I saw a clear and pressing need to solve the data usage and risk problem of sprawling datasets, and not knowing what was where and how data got used," said Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft and Dig Ventures. "Soveren is taking a unique approach to this. It's built from the ground up to listen, learn and report on data inflight without having to access existing systems or personal data."

Soveren has secured 10 lighthouse customers across software, e-commerce, travel, fintech, and healthcare in North America and Europe.

“Frankly, privacy is no longer a question of just GDPR or CCPA compliance. Privacy incidents damage your brand, growth, and ability to attract capital. With Soveren it just got easier to protect yourself from privacy incidents and risks,” noted Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO at Deel.

“The spread of personal data across a company’s applications, services, and APIs has become near impossible to track. Soveren's technological edge results in the ability to easily discover personal data, identify privacy risks, and suggest effective control measures,” noted Sergey Barysiuk, Founder & CTO of PandaDoc.

Soveren’s vision is to facilitate the inevitable shift from privacy statements on paper to privacy as an engineering discipline. “I have always believed that developers will eventually assume responsibility for privacy within organizations. Soveren provides them with the monitoring and control tools to get this job done,” said Guy Podjarny, Founder of Snyk.

Soveren is easy to deploy and free to try. To learn more, visit https://soveren.io/.

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Contact information

Vincent Touati Tomas
Head of Marketing and Communications, Northzone
vincent@northzone.com
+44 7491 758540