As covered by TechCrunch, DataFleets is proud to announce its $4.5M Seed round co-led by AME Cloud Ventures (Jerry Yang of Yahoo!) and Morado Ventures. The round also includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Peterson Ventures, Mark Cuban, LG (the Korean tech conglomerate), Marty Chavez (President of the Board of Overseers of Harvard), Stanford-StartX fund, and some of the founders of the unicorn startups Rappi, Quora, and Lucid Software.
“I am so excited for Mark Cuban Companies to be involved as an investor in DataFleets. We have been closely tracking the privacy-preserving analytics, federated learning, and differential privacy spaces over the past few years. With DataFleets, any data scientist can collaborate safely and compliantly on confidential and private data like healthcare records, financial transactions, or marketing data.” – Mark Cuban Companies
“As a large corporation, LG has customer data scattered across affiliates that cannot be easily centralized due to data privacy and data ownership. This handicaps our ability to fully utilize data’s value and to better serve our customers,” said Taejoon Park, Managing Director of LG Technology Ventures. “We are incredibly excited about how the DataFleets federated learning platform can unlock the full potential of decentralized data in a privacy-preserving manner.”
When asked about the raise, CEO David Gilmore reflected, “DataFleets is thrilled to partner with such capable and prominent investors. Drawing from their support and experience, we can more effectively serve our customers and fulfill our mission of simplifying access and privacy across the data science lifecycle.”
A product-first organization, DataFleets will use the funds to hire more engineering and technical talent.
DataFleets helps data scientists access and analyze data without compromising privacy. Cofounder Nick Elledge recently told TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey that DataFleets is “like a privacy-preserving Apache Hadoop or Apache Spark, making big data analytics work in the era of GDPR and CCPA. [Its] ‘secret sauce’ is orchestrating new and challenging techniques used by Google and Apple-like Federated Learning and Differential Privacy into a single system. [DataFleets’] Fortune 100 engagements include:
- Fortune 100 Healthcare: Connecting health patient data for academic research
- Fortune 100 Financial Services: Connecting cloud and on-prem data centers across the world for anti-money laundering and fraud detection
- Fortune 100 CPG and Retailers: Connecting 1st-party customer data to harness insights, especially as 3rd party cookies phase-out and GDPR restricts data use”
DataFleets’ founding team has deep engineering experience in distributed systems, data science, privacy-enhancing technologies, product, and design. Complementing the engineers’ technical prowess, a cadre of former MBB consultants, data scientists, and venture capitalists lead DataFleets’ marketing, sales, and general business administration. Marty Chavez, Andrew Trask, and other industry experts guide the organization as part of its Advisory Board.