privacy-tech
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Yoti Wants Your Face for One Second - And Almost Nothing Else
The British identity company spent years building a wallet for facts about you. Its breakout product asks for less: a glance at a camera, a yes-or-no answer, then deletion.
Colleen Barry Makes Privacy Sound Like a Conversation Worth Joining
The Ketch marketing leader began in sales, found her voice in an a cappella group, and now turns the machinery of data permissioning into a lively weekly conversation.
Proctorio Put the Exam Room Inside Your Laptop - Now It Has to Earn the Student's Trust
The Scottsdale software company made remote exams easy to deploy and hard to ignore. Its next test is proving that scalable oversight, useful flags, and student dignity can occupy the same browser tab.
Kyle DuPont and the Corporate Mess Hiding in Plain Sight
The Ohalo co-founder left institutional finance with a taste for difficult systems. His company now turns contracts, archives, and forgotten folders into data that enterprises can actually understand.
Tools for Humanity
Tools for Humanity built a silver sphere to answer the internet’s suddenly urgent question: is anyone here actually human? Its real product is not the Orb, but a new trust layer stretching from irises to apps, blockchains and AI agents.
DataGrail
DataGrail is a San Francisco-based data privacy company that helps modern brands automate compliance with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA. Its Agentic Data Privacy Platform - powered by an AI privacy agent named Vera and backed by more than 2,500 pre-built integrations - handles the unglamorous plumbing of privacy: mapping where personal data lives, fulfilling data subject requests, managing consent, and running privacy and AI risk assessments. Founded in 2018 by three data and go-to-market veterans, it counts Salesforce, Databricks, Instacart, and Major League Soccer among its customers.
Fabric Cryptography
Fabric Cryptography is a San Francisco hardware startup building the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - a fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set designed specifically for advanced cryptography. Founded in 2021 by Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy, Fabric aims to do for cryptography what Nvidia did for AI: dramatically accelerate workloads like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation compared with CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function accelerators. The company has raised $39M total, including a $33M Series A in August 2024 co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.
TerraTrue
TerraTrue is a San Francisco privacy and security platform that bakes compliance into the product-development process instead of bolting it on at the end. Founded in 2018 by two former Snap executives, it automates privacy, AI, and third-party risk reviews from intake to approval - flagging GDPR, CCPA, and AI Act issues while products are still being designed, not after they ship. Customers like Lyft, Roku, and Elastic use it to turn slow legal bottlenecks into fast, repeatable workflows.
Todd Mozer
Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory, Inc., the Santa Clara-based company he co-founded in 1994 that has quietly powered voice recognition in over 3 billion consumer devices - from the 'OK Google' and 'Hey Siri' wake words to smart home gadgets, automotive systems, and medical devices. A second-generation tech entrepreneur (son of physicist Forrest Mozer, with whom he also co-founded ESS Technology), Todd holds 50+ patents and an MBA from Stanford. He has spent 30+ years making AI run tiny, private, and always-on - long before the rest of the industry caught up.
Honghao Deng
Honghao Deng is the CEO and co-founder of Butlr, a San Francisco-based Physical AI company that uses anonymous thermal sensors to understand how spaces are occupied - without cameras or personal data. A Harvard GSD MDes graduate and MIT Media Lab researcher, Deng spun Butlr out of MIT in 2019 alongside co-founder Jiani Zeng. The company has raised over $105M in venture funding, deployed 30,000+ sensors across 22 countries, and processes 1 billion data points daily. Deng is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and the inventor of 'Illusory Material' - a multi-material 3D printing breakthrough named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2021.