Ketch, a firm that provides online privacy regulation and data compliance, raised an additional $20 million in A1 funding; this time led by Acrew Capital, six months after earning a $23 million Series around.
CRV, superset (the startup studio created by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya), Ridge Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank are all back with Acrew for the second round. The new investment brings Ketch’s total funding to $43 million since it emerged from stealth earlier this year.
Ketch’s data control platform for programmatic privacy, governance and security was launched in 2020. Consumer privacy preferences are honored and applied thanks to the platform’s automated data control and consent management. Businesses are looking for a means to meet customer demands while still respecting their rights and consents. Companies, on the other hand, seek data to fuel their growth and acquire consumer trust, according to Chavez of TechCrunch.
There’s also the issue of security, with a lot of work going into ransomware and malware, but Chavez believes that bringing protection to data wherever it is is a major opportunity. He explained that once the infrastructure for data control is in place, it must be at the level of individual cells and rows.
“Finding your individual row of data if you want to be removed is a challenge,” he noted. “That is a data control exercise.”
Since its March Series announcement, Ketch’s customer base has grown by more than 300 percent and the new money will be used to expand the company’s sales and go-to-market teams, according to Chavez. Ketch OTC, a free privacy solution that streamlines all areas of privacy so that enterprise compliance programs establish confidence and eliminate friction, was introduced this year. In just six months, OTC’s customer base grew fivefold. Ketch’s APIs and infrastructure are now being used by Consent, which is developing a consent user experience, according to Chavez.
When it came to finding strategic partners, Chavez and Vaidya wanted to have people around the table who could provide insight into what they were doing and guidance as they built out their goods. They discovered it in Acrew founding partner Theresia Gouw, dubbed “the OG of privacy and security” by Chavez.
Ketch, according to Gouw, is turning the data privacy and security model on its head by putting it in the hands of developers. She recognized an opportunity to increase and double down on Acrew’s first investment when she noticed more people working from home and more data breaches.
