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Check out the pitch deck privacy compliance platform SafeGuard Privacy used to raise $7 million in funding
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- Privacy-compliance platform SafeGuard Privacy has raised $7 million in a “late-stage seed” round.
- The US-based firm plans to use the investment to grow its engineering, sales, and legal teams.
- Check out key slides from the pitch deck that helped SafeGuard Privacy secure the investment.
US-based privacy-compliance startup SafeGuard Privacy on Thursday said it had raised $7 million in “late-stage seed funding,” investment it plans to use to grow its engineering, sales, and legal teams.
Founded in 2019 by advertising industry veteran Richy Glassberg and longtime attorney Wayne Matus, SafeGuard Privacy describes itself as the “TurboTax of privacy compliance.”
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For an annual fee, SafeGuard Privacy offers software that helps companies assess whether they are adhering to various global privacy laws, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Companies can complete a checklist to assess their privacy compliance and benchmark the compliance of their vendors. In areas where they might fall short, the platform can autopopulate emails to send to their teams or outside counsel in order to fix issues and offers template policy language.
Its project-management software also includes areas for in-team collaboration and remediation. The platform logs and timestamps all events, which provides an audit trail for regulators showing the efforts companies have made to prevent breaches.
Glassberg said SafeGuard Privacy helps companies mitigate risk and save money on hourly lawyer fees as a patchwork of different privacy laws roll out across US states and globally.
“These privacy laws affect every company but they’re basically written for any marketer that has data on a consumer,” said Glassberg. He said SafeGuard Privacy differs from other privacy-compliance software because it approaches the problem from a marketer perspective. SafeGuard Privacy also intends to apply its software beyond privacy regulation to other areas, such as compliance with finance and InfoSec laws and standards.
SafeGuard Privacy’s investment round was led by the venture capital firm TechOperators and Irwin Gotlieb, the former global chairman and CEO of the WPP media agency GroupM.
“We’re proud that in a market where nobody is funding anything that really smart people see the value and the potential of what we have built.” Glassberg said.
Check out the key slides from the pitch deck that helped SafeGuard Privacy raise its $7 million late-stage seed round below.
SafeGuard Privacy describes itself as a “software as a service” privacy compliance platform.
The company aims to streamline and automate the process of privacy compliance.
Researchers at Gartner estimated that privacy regulations will cover almost 80% of the global by 2024, up from just 10% in 2015. Fines and the cost of complying with privacy laws are also growing.
SafeGuard Privacy aims to make it faster and cheaper for companies to keep on the right side of global privacy regulation.
It also aims to help companies keep track of whether the vendors they use are privacy-compliant.
SafeGuard Privacy acts as a workflow management tool that aims to help companies mitigate their privacy risk.
Premium and Vendor Compliance Hub are the company’s two core products.
SafeGuard Privacy says it helps its clients save anywhere between $25,000 and $2 million on their privacy compliance.
Clients include Publishers Clearing House and the marketing agency BusinessOnline.
SafeGuard Privacy says it differentiates itself from other privacy software because it has brought compliance, workflow management, and vendor risk assessment under one roof.
Gartner estimates that companies will spend at least $8 billion on privacy compliance tools in 2022.
Big advertisers hold a huge amount of data on their consumers and also use scores of external vendors, which opens them up to privacy risk.
SafeGuard Privacy recently added Rachel Walkden to its leadership team. She had previously worked in senior roles at the adtech and martech companies Sizmek, Affinity X, and Operative.
A key feature of the platform is a benchmarking tool that scores companies’ vendors on their risks to different privacy laws.
SafeGuard Privacy later aims to move into more areas of vendor compliance, such as InfoSec, HR, and HIPAA regulations.
SafeGuard Privacy says that companies spend between $50,000 and $2 million with external law firms just to comply with CCPA.
The process of privacy compliance is long and costly.
Ensuring vendor compliance can be even more time-consuming for companies.
SafeGuard Privacy aims to simplify those processes.
Adtech in particular can be a privacy nightmare for companies. “Our ecosystem has got so complicated,” Glassberg said. “We make it easier for marketers to ensure their vendors are complaint while facing that complexity challenge.”