Evervault, an Irish data privacy start-up led by Shane Curran, an Irish 20-year-old former Young Scientist winner, has landed $16 million in Series A funding.
Founded by Shane Curran, Dublin-based start-up Evervault attracted investment to develop technology that would eliminate the need for privacy regulations and replace them with privacy technology.
Evervault has not developed any product that is ready for customers and investors are instead backing the concept since it would potentially save companies a lot of money on compliance while simultaneously providing greater data protection.
Curran, who won the BT Young Scientist Award in 2017 for his research into data privacy, said that he founded the company in 2018, shortly after the introduction of Europe's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) forced companies to scramble to comply with the new privacy laws.
His first act was to develop an eight-step privacy manifesto that any system should have to follow and he asserted that all data should be stored in "privacy cages."
He said that these cages are like containers that store fully-encrypted data and only allow the owner of the original data to access it.
The company processing the data would only have temporary access to it in order to perform a service before the data completely vanishes from the company's system.
Curran said that data privacy is overcomplicated by thousands of pages of regulations and said that technology would be more efficient at solving the problem than any law.
"We're aiming to distill what GDPR did in 99 articles down to one line of coding," he said.
"At Evervault, we believe that data privacy isn't a regulatory problem, it's a technology problem."
Shane Curran after he won the 53st BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2017. (RollingNews.ie)
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Curran plans to develop an API with Evervault that companies can use when developing a new platform, app, or system.
He argues that the privacy cages would life a financial burden on companies that have to spend a fortune on compliance training and enforcement in addition to enhancing security and privacy for users and customers.
Furthermore, he argues that the technology would ease the strain on lawmakers who have to enforce privacy laws.
Leading venture-capital firm Index Ventures led the latest round of investment into the Dublin-based company. Index Ventures has previously backed Facebook, Deliveroo, Revolut and Just Eat.
Delighted to share the news of our partnership with @IndexVentures as well as existing partners @sequoia, @kleinerperkins and othershttps://t.co/DDV7PXMW9T
— Shane Curran (@arcurn) May 21, 2020
Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins also participated in the investment and invested in the company last October.
Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos also invested in the Dublin company.
Evervault has now raised about $19 million in the last year.
The company currently employs eight staff and Curran is looking to hire more workers to develop the innovative technology.
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