Behind the Investment: Privado

Apoorva Goyal, Nagu Chidambaram | August 31, 2022| 1 min. read

 Software has continued to expand into all parts of the world from mobile phones and websites to household devices. As developers ship products, applications, and features at a feverish pace, there has been a strong push in recent years to integrate security in the development lifecycle, but privacy still remains a very manual, ad hoc process. It has led to companies collecting excess data, sharing sensitive data with third parties, data leakage, and improper use of personal data. Regulators around the world have started to take notice and already cumulated $1.7B in GDPR related fines in just the early innings. 


In comes Privado. Privado is a privacy code scanning solution that helps bring visibility to privacy teams on data usage across engineering products, applications, and services. They integrate with Git and perform a static code scan on repositories to identify all user facing products, internal services, ML models, dashboards, APIs, etc. identifying end user personal data usage and personal data flows. Without Privado, privacy and security teams have to 1) survey data across hundreds of processes and build document around each product / service, 2) monitor and track all new code changes being pushed out daily making documentation out of date, and 3) govern and track all personal data flowing to third parties to prevent privacy leaks. This all has to be done monthly involving hundreds of hours of back and forth between product / engineering teams and privacy teams while still missing privacy leaks. 


The need to shift Privacy Left “DevPrivOps” has only increased as privacy and compliance within the code base has become table stakes for all businesses as they scale. We are still in the early stages of the market evolution but there are several strong market tailwinds that are unfolding. Several new consumer & user privacy laws are being rolled out every year across countries / states and across different industries. As a result, thousands of core C-Level roles are being created around data privacy and compliance, and trying to work with privacy, security, legal and dev teams to be more aligned on ensuring a proactive approach towards privacy and compliance management. These strong market tailwinds combined with the current manual, reactive process of privacy management creates a very compelling market opportunity for Privado and uniquely positions them to be the market leading embedded developer privacy platform! 


When we first met Vaibhav in early 2021, we knew right away he was building something special and was truly building a category defining company. They had gone through a few pivots, but we knew they had reached product market fit when we consistently heard from their customers about the tremendous ROI they were seeing just months into using Privado - customers would excitedly highlight the “hundreds of hours saved on privacy with privado” or Privado’s “intuitive UI / UX that builds directly into both privacy and dev team’s workflows”. Furthermore, Vaibhav and his team of privacy enthusiasts are exceptional seen by their thoughtful, sharp, scrappy and hungry nature aligning well with all of Insight’s core values. 


We are thrilled and honored to co-lead Privado’s Pre-Series A alongside our friends at Sequoia India with participation from Together, Better, Emergent, and others! The future is developer led privacy and we are beyond excited to partner with Vaibhav and his team to make that a reality!