Swiss startup Decentriq raises $3.8 million to help enterprises keep their data confidential

Decentriq, a Swiss enterprise data security company, has raised a $3.8 million seed round led by btov Partners, with backing from Paladin Capital Group and existing investor Atlantic Labs. The funding will drive international growth and widen the client base, which currently resides mostly in the healthcare and finance sectors. Founded last year, the Zurich-based startup also co-founded the Confidential Computing Consortium among tech giants such as Alibaba, Google and Microsoft. Confidential computing is the underlying technology of Decentriq’s platform, which shrinks the time and cost for enterprises to build and maintain sensitive data ecosystems, i.e. when two entities want to share data securely.

Currently, this is only possible through legal contracts (which take months to approve) or by anonymising and aggregating the data, which reduces its value. “Data is the essential raw material of the 21st century, and sophisticated machine learning-driven analytics unlock tremendous value from these assets,” said Andreas Goeldi, partner at btov Partners.

Decentriq’s cloud-based platform enables enterprises to access sensitive data, as well as analyse and share their own data, all while complying to GDPR. The data stays encrypted while in use, even when it’s with a third party or when external machine learning tools are applied.