Mine, using AI for data privacy and governance, raises $30 million

The company will be building out an AI moduel to help companies deal with upcoming regulations

Most of us have know idea where our personal data is on the internet; we're asked to give it out so often that tracking who knows what about us seems like a fool's errand. Surprisingly, though, most companies also don't know what data is out there: they don't know what they have or where it is. That can be a problem when companies have to comply with regulations, such as GDPR, which can lead to massive fines. 

"These companies are moving so fast, they're highly dynamic, and even they don't have any clue what systems they are using, what their employees are using, and what personal data they keep about their employees, their customers, their end users," said Gal Ringel, co-founder and CEO of Mine, a company mapping data directly to its unique privacy governance requirements, which announced $30 million in Series B funding on Tuesday. 

"The core problem we wanted to solve is, how can we help companies find the systems that they're using? Whether there's any SaaS applications or anything that they keep within the cloud environment, and then what types of data, like credit cards, personal data, physical address, email addresses, health information, do they keep in their systems?"

Mind's primary product, MineOS, is a data mapping tool that uses in no-code approach, meaning that organizations don't need any engineer to write any line of code. The product can map, in real time, all the systems that the company uses, such as their CRMs, product analytics, and HR systems, and then any asset that they have within their cloud environment, whether it's within Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, the company can find in real time.

Additionally, it can run a data classification process, so it scans the data within each system that we find and give the company a very accurate report on what types of data they keep inside. Once the corporation gets that report, and they know what data they have and where it is, Mine helps make that data actionable.

"It's not enough that we gave you a snapshot today. What happens tomorrow morning? You can have a new employee within the company that would start interacting with the new system, so you want to know about it, or any existing system that you have, or any existing vendor, can suddenly start collecting personal data that you want to be aware of," said Ringle. 

The idea is to allow companies to not waste time and resources on repetitive tasks; according to Gartner, when a company wants to process an incoming privacy request, whether it's data deletion or to send a copy of the data, each one can cost an average organization $1,400, and an organization can get hundreds, or even thousands, of these requests a month.

"All the things around ensuring the company is compliant to different privacy regulations and maintaining that in their day to day, it means that if you don't have any tool that can automate these things, there are a lot of employees within the companies that are part of these processes, so it wastes a lot of time of different people," said Ringel.

"We interviewed hundreds of privacy and legal teams in IT to really understand their daily repetitive work that they're doing around privacy regulations and we really created a lot of different business use cases which truly automate that. So, instead of you having to keep doing manual, repetitive and time consuming tasks, like data mapping, we automate a lot of these activities. At a high level, we're trying to simplify privacy and not complicate it."

The company's value also comes from helping its customers avoid fines, which can vary from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions, or even billions. Mine, on the other hand, charges anywhere between $20,000 a year to $150,000, depending on the company size and their usage. 

In addition to its consumer-facing product, Mine also provides a web-based tool for consumers which, in only a few seconds, can build their digital footprint, giving them a list of all the companies that they ever gave their personal data to.

The tool, which is currently used by more than 5 million users, costs a few dollars a month. It finds the data, then the company helps individuals understand their online exposure, what types of data those companies have, and if the consumer is at risk of identity theft, reputation damage, or financial loss. Mine also helps consumers initiate a deletion process of their data.

"The combination of these two products together allow us to bridge the gap between individuals and companies and create a better internet and create a better experience around privacy regulations," explained Ringel. 

The new funding round was led by Battery Ventures, with investments from PayPal Ventures and Nationwide Ventures, as well as the participation of all existing investors including Saban Ventures, Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI), MassMutual Ventures and Headline Ventures. This brings its total funding to $42.5 million

This investment will be used, in part, to expand MineOS to the enterprise; right now, the company is focused on the upper end of the mid-market, meaning customers that are a few thousand of employees. Starting next year, though, the plan is to start penetrating the enterprise segment, meaning targeting Fortune 500 companies.

In addition, the company will also be launching an AI risk governance module to deal with upcoming AI regulations in Europe and the US; the moduel will power different teams within the organization to start documenting the AI algorithms that they're using, how they collected consent for the data, and basically, to create the policies around that. 

Finally, the company will be expanding from privacy that we started from privacy capabilities to data governance.

"We want to be the core data lifecycle management. The vision is to read a single source of truth for the data within the organization. This is called data lifecycle management. And on top of it, we want to have different use cases that would fit different teams within the organization," Ringel said. 

(Image source: mineos.ai)