The privacy-preserving data collaboration company letting banks, insurers, retailers and brands analyze data together - without ever sharing it.
In most of the data economy, value comes from exposure - the more information companies copy, merge and move between each other, the more they can learn, and the more risk they take on. Omnisient was built on the opposite premise: that organizations can analyze their first-party consumer data together and never share, expose or move a single personal record.
Founded in Cape Town in 2019 by Jon Jacobson and Anton Grutzmacher, Omnisient - Collaborative Consumer Intelligence operates an independent, privacy-preserving data collaboration platform. It uses privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), advanced cryptography and AI to let a bank and a grocery retailer - or an insurer and a pharmacy - discover mutual customers and study behavior together, while each party's raw data stays locked inside its own environment. The company describes the result as "collaborative consumer intelligence": insight created jointly, ownership retained separately.
The mechanism is deliberately unglamorous. Before any collaboration happens, each participant runs Omnisient's desktop onboarding application inside its own systems to anonymize and tokenize personally identifiable information, generating a US-patented "Crypto-ID" for every consumer profile. Only those cryptographic tokens are ever matched. Personal data never leaves home, and no party sees another's underlying records. The platform is ISO 27001 certified and, by the company's account, protects more than 500 million consumer records for over 100 large enterprises.
There is a hard truth in financial services: the consumers who most need access to credit are often the ones lenders can see the least. No credit history means no data, and no data means no loan - a loop that leaves millions of "credit-invisible" and "thin-file" people locked out of formal finance, particularly across emerging markets.
Omnisient's answer is alternative data. A person may have no borrowing record, but they do have behavior - years of grocery shopping, telco usage, or insurance patterns held by consumer brands who are usually strangers to the lending decision. If a bank could safely learn from that behavior, it could assess risk for someone the traditional bureau file cannot.
That is exactly what the platform enables, and its customers sit on both sides of the exchange. On one side are the data owners - supermarkets, telcos, pharmacies, gyms and other consumer brands sitting on high-value first-party behavioral data. On the other are the data users - banks, insurers and bureaus seeking sharper signals for credit scoring, marketing and risk.
Between them, Omnisient plays the neutral operator: it never takes ownership of anyone's data, only facilitates the privacy-safe collaboration. Consumer brands turn dormant data into a new revenue stream. Lenders reach customers they previously had to turn away. And consumers keep their privacy intact throughout.
Each company runs Omnisient's onboarding app inside its own environment to anonymize and tokenize personal data before anything leaves.
US-patented cryptographic tokens are created for every consumer profile - identities become unreadable, matchable keys.
Only the tokens are compared, letting parties find shared customers across datasets without exposing a single record.
Inside privacy-safe clean rooms, AI analyzes the joined, anonymized data to produce insights, scores and new revenue.
In deployments where banks collaborated with a major grocery retailer, applicants' anonymized shopping behavior became an alternative signal for credit risk. The company reports the following results from that work.
We want to create the world's largest repository of alternative consumer data to grow financial inclusion.
The independent PETs-and-cryptography platform where organizations analyze first-party data together without sharing or exposing it - the foundation for every use case.
AI-powered, privacy-safe environments where lenders score credit-invisible and thin-file consumers using anonymized behavioral data - now being brought to the US.
Lets retailers, telcos and other brands generate new revenue from high-value first-party data without ever exposing customer identities.
Local software that anonymizes and tokenizes personal data inside the owner's own environment before any collaboration begins.
Single-customer-view analytics, identity resolution and predictive modeling built on securely matched, anonymized datasets.
Privacy frameworks, data governance and compliance automation designed for regulated industries handling sensitive consumer data.
Omnisient's model is B2B and three-sided. Consumer brands supply behavioral data and earn from it; financial institutions consume privacy-safe signals and pay for access; consumers keep their privacy and gain access to fairer credit. The company earns through platform access, collaboration and data-exchange fees, and value-share arrangements - always as a neutral operator that never owns the underlying data.
Where many clean-room rivals target advertising and measurement, Omnisient is focused on credit scoring, risk and financial inclusion.
Traditional brokers copy and sell data. Omnisient matches cryptographic tokens - personal records never move between parties.
The platform was proven where hundreds of millions are credit-invisible, then exported - constraint-tested infrastructure heading to the US.
Competitors in the broader space include Snowflake Data Clean Rooms, InfoSum, LiveRamp and Habu, AWS Clean Rooms and Decentriq. Omnisient's differentiation is less about the clean-room concept itself and more about the vertical it chose - alternative credit data - and the patented Crypto-ID tokenization it uses to make collaboration provably private.
The November 2025 round is the headline: global credit bureau TransUnion co-led it, building on a June 2025 minority investment and board seat. That a major bureau chose to invest in - rather than compete with - a startup reinventing alternative data is, in itself, a signal about where the market is heading.
Jon Jacobson and Anton Grutzmacher launch a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform for emerging markets.
First deployments let banks assess credit risk using retailers' anonymized grocery-shopping behavior.
Shoprite Group among backers in a pre-Series A round supporting data collaboration growth.
Investment fuels global expansion and the financial-inclusion mission.
TransUnion invests, takes a board seat and co-leads a $12.5M round to bring alternative credit data clean rooms to the US.
The roughly 59-person team combines expertise in cryptography, secure multi-party computation, data engineering, AI/ML and financial services. Leadership pairs deep software experience with a stated purpose: ethical use of data as a force for inclusion, guided internally by nine core values from "be honest & transparent" to "leave your mark."
Group CEO. Software engineer and entrepreneur with 25+ years building businesses, raising capital and designing consumer-data platforms. Sits on the Forbes Technology Council.
Chief Revenue Officer. Focused on unlocking the value of data in ways that drive both commercial growth and positive social impact.
IAPP Privacy Innovation Award · World Economic Forum recognition · Microsoft Partner of the Year 2024 · FT Africa's Fastest Growing Companies · ISO 27001.
A person's grocery basket can help a bank assess their credit risk - even with no prior loan history.
Personal data never actually moves between companies; only anonymized Crypto-ID tokens are matched.
The name plays on "omniscient" - all-seeing - yet the whole design is about insight without seeing identities.
Built in Cape Town for emerging markets, its privacy-first infrastructure is now being exported to the US.
A global credit bureau chose to invest in - rather than compete with - the startup rewiring alternative data.
It operates a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform that lets organizations analyze each other's first-party consumer data together to generate insights - without ever sharing, exposing or moving the underlying personal data.
Each participant anonymizes and tokenizes its data locally using Omnisient's onboarding app, generating US-patented Crypto-IDs. Only those tokens are matched, so personally identifiable information never leaves the owner's environment. The company is ISO 27001 certified.
More than 100 large enterprises - major banks, insurers, retailers, telcos and healthcare organizations, primarily in Africa and now expanding into the US - protecting over 500 million consumer records.
By letting lenders use alternative data, like anonymized shopping behavior, to score credit-invisible and thin-file consumers. In one deployment, 3.2 million previously invisible people newly qualified for credit.
Investors include global credit bureau TransUnion, which co-led a $12.5M Series A in November 2025 and holds a board seat, plus Arise and Africa's largest retailer, Shoprite Group. Total funding is about $22.2M.
Sources: omnisient.com · Crunchbase · Disrupt Africa · Financial IT · TransUnion newsroom · Financial Times · Forbes Technology Council. Figures reported by the company where noted; funding and dates from public announcements.