Duality Technologies, a provider of privacy-enhanced data collaboration solutions, reveals that it has secured $30 million via a Series B round, bringing its total funding to $49 million.
The company’s round was reportedly led by LG Technology Ventures along with contributions from Euclidean Capital and the National Bank of Canada‘s corporate VC division NAventures, as well as existing investors Intel Capital, Hearst Ventures and Team8.
Duality’s management noted that they will use the proceeds to expand their go-to-market operations, advance their partnerships with leading tech vendors, and further cement their product and technology leadership “in the fields of privacy-preserving machine learning and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs).”
Established by experienced cryptographers and data scientists, Duality has “harnessed its foremost expertise in Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and data science to develop the Duality SecurePlus® suite of secure data collaboration applications, addressing the specific business needs of organizations which seek to collaborate with their ecosystem on sensitive data while protecting their business interests and complying with data privacy regulations.”
Duality SecurePlus apps have been designed to enable organizations “to collaborate on protected data and AI models, by keeping them encrypted during computation.”
The collaborating parties are able to “securely run computations in any environment – whether their own, their partners’, or on a third-party cloud – without exposing sensitive data, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII).”
By facilitating collaborative analysis of decentralized sensitive data, Duality “enables enterprises to overcome challenges posed by growing data localization and privacy regulations and join forces across jurisdictions to leverage sensitive internal data for collaboration in business, science and security in today’s increasingly data-driven global economy.”
A Gartner report had identified privacy-enhancing computation as one of this year’s top strategic technology trends, “predicting that by 2025, half of large organizations will adopt privacy-enhancing computation as a means of processing data.””
Duality provides privacy-enhanced apps for a variety of use cases across regulated industries, including Financial Services, Healthcare, and Government.
“The amount of data businesses possess has been multiplying exponentially, yet the breadth and depth of insights they can extract from it have not expanded at the same rate, mainly due to data silos caused by growing data privacy regulations and business barriers,” stated Dr. Alon Kaufman, CEO and Co-Founder, Duality Technologies.
Dr. Alon added:
“Duality’s collaborative, secure computing solutions offer a way out of this impasse by making data usable while keeping it protected. Companies and organizations recognize that embracing privacy-preserving technology is becoming a core business need, giving them a competitive edge while protecting their sensitive data assets. We are excited by this round of financing led by LG Technology Ventures and are empowered by our new and existing investors’ shared vision of the transformational impact of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies on the future of data collaboration and AI.”
The firm’s leadership in PETs has been recognized by a $14.5M DARPA contract to create an advanced privacy-preserving hardware accelerator to “enable privacy preserving machine learning applications.”
Duality is also working with Intel to optimize HE-based privacy-enhanced data science and AI applications.
“As privacy challenges mount in our data-driven world, Duality has established itself as a market leader in the swiftly developing privacy tech space,” stated Taejoon Park, MD, LG Technology Ventures.
Park added:
“Demand for collaborative and secure computing techniques is skyrocketing – including privacy-preserving AI and Machine Learning analytics – and will continue to do so as businesses look to unlock their treasure chests of data while staying on the right side of increasingly complex privacy regulations. Duality is ideally positioned to lead the applications of privacy-enhanced computing in numerous industries through this period of rapid change, and I am excited to see the company expand its highly innovative solutions to even more fields.”