Ben Brook

Ask a large company to delete everything it knows about you and you set off a small panic. Your name is in the marketing tool, your email in the support desk, your purchase history in three warehouses nobody fully remembers building. Somewhere a lawyer promises it can be done in thirty days. Somewhere an engineer quietly wonders how. Ben Brook built a company on the gap between that promise and that question.

Transcend, the company he co-founded in 2017 and runs as CEO, treats privacy as an engineering problem rather than a legal one. Its software crawls a company's sprawl of systems, finds where a person's data actually lives, and then exports it, hands it back, or erases it - on request, at scale, automatically. The pitch is unglamorous and enormous: the plumbing that turns a privacy law into a working button. By the company's own count, that button has delivered real data rights to more than 1.2 billion people.

Brook did not arrive at this through a compliance department. He grew up in Toronto, where he became an award-winning filmmaker before he ever shipped a line of privacy code. The eye for a scene never quite left; he talks about privacy as an experience that should delight rather than nag, which is a strange thing to want from a data-deletion request and exactly the thing most of the industry forgets.

At Harvard he refused to pick a lane, studying computer science alongside astrophysics and neuroscience - three ways of asking how complicated systems behave when nobody is watching them closely. There he met Mike Farrell in a computer science class. They bonded over a shared irritation: the machinery for handling personal data was broken, and almost nobody was treating it like the technical challenge it plainly was.

That sentence is the whole thesis. Bolt privacy on at the end, as policy and paperwork, and it stays a promise. Wire it into the systems themselves and it becomes a property of the software, something that happens whether or not a human remembers to make it happen. It is a builder's idea, not a lawyer's, and it explains why Transcend looks more like infrastructure than like the binders of consent forms that came before it.

The day after graduation

The origin story is almost annoyingly clean. Brook graduated from Harvard in 2017 and flew to San Francisco the next day to start the company. No gap year, no slow ramp, no hedging the bet with a safe job first. The conviction that personal data was about to become one of the defining technical problems of the decade was strong enough to skip the part where you wait to be sure.

The timing was good. Europe's GDPR was about to land in 2018, California's CCPA close behind, and a wave of regulation turned a niche concern into a board-level one. Companies suddenly owed legal obligations they had no technical means to keep. Transcend started by automating the messy core of it - receiving a data-subject request and actually fulfilling it across every system that held a trace of the person - and expanded outward from there into consent, preference management, data mapping, and the governance questions that artificial intelligence is now making louder.

Quiet money, loud names

The backing accumulated without much noise. An early round of roughly $25M came from Index Ventures and Accel, with South Park Commons in the mix and a roster of operators who tend to bet on infrastructure: Phil Venables, the former chief information security officer at Goldman Sachs, and Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma. In May 2024 came the $40M Series B led by StepStone Group, with HighlandX and the existing investors following on. Total raised: nearly $90M, aimed squarely at the legacy incumbents who turned privacy compliance into checkbox software.

What Brook is selling against that old guard is a point of view. Privacy, in his telling, is not a tax on the business or a wall between a company and its customers. Done right it is a form of trust, and trust is the thing that lets data move at all. The companies that figure out how to give people genuine control, he argues, end up with permission to do more, not less. It is an optimistic stance from someone whose job is mostly about deletion.

The filmmaker's tell

The part that does not fit the founder template is the filmmaking, and it is the part that explains the rest. Film is the discipline of making something complicated feel effortless to the person watching - of hiding the rig, the lighting, the forty takes, so the audience feels only the scene. That is, almost exactly, the ambition for good privacy software: hide the staggering complexity of finding one person's data across a hundred systems, and leave the person with a single clear moment of control. Brook spent his early years learning to make the machinery invisible. He has been doing the same thing ever since, just with different machinery.