https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/24/very-good-security-raises-35-million-to-protect-companies-private-customer-data/
By Paul Sawers
VentureBeat.com
October 24, 2019
Very Good Security (VGS), a data privacy platform that helps financial and
healthcare service providers and others protect their customers’ data, has
raised $35 million in a series B round of funding led by Goldman Sachs’
merchant banking division, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and
Vertex Ventures, among other existing investors.
Founded out of San Francisco in 2016, VGS is built on the notion that most
companies don’t actually want to store people’s private data. They don’t want
to keep social security numbers (SSNs) or bank card details on file — but they
have to if they want to check up on customers’ credit history or collect money
for a monthly subscription. This is where VGS comes into play, providing a
“developer-friendly” platform so businesses can offload sensitive data. VGS
bills itself as a third-party custodian that specializes in protecting data and
ensuring regulatory compliance.
“For most companies, data is simply an input to achieve a business outcome,
such as getting paid, underwriting a loan, or running a background check,”
noted VGS cofounder and CEO Mahmoud Abdelkader. “VGS provides specialized SaaS
infrastructure to make it easy for developers and businesses to achieve their
objectives while offloading the risk that comes with data custodianship.”
Using VGS, companies can leverage the value of data without having access to
the data itself — for example, they can take money from a customer’s bank
account without ever knowing their bank account details. VGS effecitvely “wraps
around” companies’ systems, keeping them from ever coming into direct contact
with private data. The platform redacts and tokenizes sensitive information,
giving the business a hashed “aliased” version that consists of random
characters.
[...]
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