This former Symantec exec just raised $50 million for his startup that helps companies comply with data privacy laws like California's sweeping new legislation

Rehan Jalil

Former Symantec exec Rehan Jalil wants to capitalize on the increased need for data privacy and security tools given sweeping new data privacy laws in California and Europe.
Jalil founded Securiti.ai with his former Symantec colleagues in late 2018, to create tools that help businesses comply with the strict requirements of laws like Europe's GDPR or California's CCPA.
The company raised $50 million in Series B funding earlier this week, led by General Catalyst along with Mayfield, on the back of strong customer demand, Jalil tells Business Insider.
Jalil says his company is part of a new market called "privacy ops," which are tools that help businesses automatically make sure data stays private and secure.
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Data privacy and security are top of mind for many companies right now, especially given California's new data privacy law, CCPA, which took effect at the beginning of this year, and Europe's data privacy law, GDPR.

Former Symantec cloud security executive Rehan Jalil and his team at Securiti.ai want to capitalize on that and help companies stay compliant with the new law — without having to spend too much precious time thinking about it. Securiti.ai creates tools to help businesses automatically comply with data privacy laws, which are meant to give consumers rights over their own data.

The company announced that it raised $50 million in Series B funding earlier this week, in a round led by General Catalyst along with Mayfield. This comes just a few months after the company's Series A round, and a year and a half after the company started in late 2018.

Jalil said the reason it's raising another round so soon is because the company is seeing huge demand.

"As soon as we launched in August last year, it was an absolutely clear realization that the timing of what we've built, this privacy ops platform, couldn't really be better," Jalil told Business Insider. "We started heading up a lot of traction with customers and now we're getting even more of that."

Stricter laws are good for business

Privacy laws like the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) and Europe's General Data Protection Requirement (GDPR) allow consumers to request a copy of all the data a company has collected about them — and, furthermore, requires that data be deleted upon request.

That's not something many companies are equipped to do. Often, customer data is scattered in many different places within a company's computer systems and finding it and then deleting it is an expensive and labor-intensive process. The state of California estimated that companies will spend up to $55 billion this year to get in compliance with CCPA.

Jalil expects that this is only the beginning. In the wake of GDPR and CCPA, Jalil sees a growing international movement taking shape, with countries like Brazil, India, and Australia seemingly slated to pass their own data privacy laws.

As a result, Jalil said his business is growing exponentially, as companies need to find effective ways to comply with the laws. He's even coined a term for the market that's emerging around these tools: "privacy ops."

What is 'privacy ops?'

Jalil defines privacy ops as tools that can help companies automatically keep pace with the fast-moving world of privacy legislation. Securiti.ai has built tools that use bots to help companies go through the steps of collecting, verifying, and compiling the data and then showing it to the consumer and deleting it upon request.

Jalil and his co-founders have experience working in security, having worked together at Symantec's cloud security business. Jalil says that privacy ops represents a different kind of security from what companies needed in the past.

"It's a whole new era of privacy, because 10, 20 years back, this kind of data did not exist. Any small company now can have so much data compiled, it gets sold, it gets changed, so that is definitely a new era of lack of privacy," Jalil said.

He adds that companies like Facebook now have entire teams doing what he'd qualify as privacy ops, and many more are actively hiring for those types of roles.

Securiti.ai now has 190 employees. Jalil declined to share metrics around the number of customers the company has, given how new the company is and how fast its growing, but said since launching their platform has processed "data for over 100 million identities, with customers across all major verticals."

Recently, the company began offering a free version of its service, giving companies a basic product to help with their data privacy and security, before shelling out for the premium version. The company plans to use the new funding to continue growing and adding more capability.

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