Privado raises $14 million in round led by Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital India

Data privacy solutions provider Privado has raised $14 million in its Series A funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital India, with participation from existing investors Together Fund and Emergent Ventures.

The startup plans to utilise the funding to enhance and develop Privado’s technology stack, build out the team and grow its open-source community, it said in a media statement on Thursday.

Founded in 2020 by Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan, and Vaibhav Antil, Privado offers services to address privacy issues facing businesses around the world.

Privado is an open-source code scanning solution purpose-built for privacy that identifies data usage, discovers data flows and flags privacy issues like excessive user permissions or data leakages to logs.

Privacy teams can also enforce their public-facing privacy policies in code, helping them avoid fines. Privado claims to currently manage over 600,000 code commits for companies like Thrasio and Zego and more.

Prior to starting Privado, the cofounders worked in tech companies in product and engineering teams where they saw the challenges of Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance firsthand. Which inspired the team to start Privado.

“The new funding will allow us to further our mission of embedding privacy into software development, and we’re excited to partner with Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital India on this journey,” cofounder Antil said in the statement.

"With our privacy code scans, engineers and privacy teams get instant visibility into personal data usage by their products and applications, can monitor personal data flows and find privacy risks that exist in the code from leakage to logs," he added.

In addition to the code scanning solution, Privado has launched a free tool for Android developers to generate Play Store Data Safety reports. Privado is also extending this tool to a full-fledged open source privacy code scanning project.

Privado, with offices in Pune and Delaware, raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round in January.

“Privacy and data are two sides of the same coin. Data has been one of the biggest trends in the last few years and it’s only a matter of time before privacy catches up…We’re impressed by the customer feedback and are thrilled to be a part of their mission,” said Abhishek Mohan, principal, Sequoia India.