SafeGuard Privacy Raises $7M to Automate Data Privacy Compliance
SafeGuard Privacy, a SaaS platform that automates data privacy regulation compliance, raised $7 million to fuel its mission to simplify increasingly complex privacy regulations.
SafeGuard serves major data clean room and martech companies such as Neustar and Habu. This suggests that other martech and privacy solution providers rely on the company to process emerging regulations and help their own clients access and share customer data in privacy-safe ways.
But SafeGuard is not only serving vendors. It is also working with publishers, agencies, and brands. The company says proliferating privacy rules and platform changes pose a threat that brands and their partners need to navigate to survive. In other words, privacy compliance has become existential.
“These global trends seriously threaten brands who depend on consumer trust and business for survival,” said co-founder Richy Glassberg. “Our unique privacy 3.0 technology redefines and simplifies complex compliance through automation, making it easy for companies large and small to comply and get back to business.”
SaaS comes to privacy compliance
Privacy compliance isn’t a new issue. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation forced some adtech firms out of the region when it went into effect in 2018. California’s privacy law compounded privacy ramifications in the US two years later, and California and many other states have followed up with increasingly stringent regulations.
A spate of tools has emerged to help brands, publishers, and other organizations figure out privacy laws as well as new platform rules by private gatekeepers such as Google and Apple. In essence, a two-sided transparency problem has emerged where the challenge for enterprises is not only communicating data practices clearly to consumers and obtaining their consent but also figuring out what data they have, how to safeguard it, and how to comply with many different regulations.
That’s where SafeGuard Privacy comes in — because the most interesting component of its rise may be its billing as a SaaS solution. This may be the next phase of privacy tech, which has become a booming industry within the martech universe. Privacy tech must be not just effective but easy to use — and so, the SaaS-ification of the rest of martech comes to data privacy.
