Cytrio, a Boston-based data privacy and compliance startup, has launched its software-as-a-service privacy rights management platform after landing $3.5 million in seed funding.
The funding was secured from angel investors and institutional seed investors, including Dreamit Ventures, Food Retail Ventures and Rockwood Group, and values the company at “north of $10 million”, Cytrio co-founder and CEO Vijay Basani told TechCrunch.
The raise also included Cytrio’s founding team. This includes Basani, who previously founded WebManage Technologies (acquired by NetApp), AppIQ (acquired by HP) and Cygilant, as well as chief privacy officer Pankaj Parekh, who previously worked at Zscaler and Microsoft.
Cytrio’s founding team claims more than 50 years of data, privacy and security experience. The startup said it’s looking to serve mid-market companies, which Cytrio claims often struggle to adopt data privacy regulations due to the fact that current privacy rights management solutions are expensive, complex to deploy and difficult to use. The company says it’s filling this gap with its privacy rights management platform — built on AI-led data discovery and automated response workflows — which will help small and medium-sized companies comply with a range of emerging privacy legislation, including in California, Virginia and Colorado.
“Current first-generation privacy rights management solutions on the market do not play well in the mid-market due to deployment complexity, long time to value and the requirement of dedicated privacy teams,” Basani told TechCrunch. “Cytrio is challenging this paradigm with a next-gen privacy rights management solution where we believe we can deliver value on day one.”
Basani adds that “data privacy compliance is about to get even more critical”, with “a slew of new Acts, heftier fines and potential impacts on revenues going to hit companies found unprepared.”
“While enterprises can absorb some of these challenges and have the resources to manage data privacy mid-market companies simply do not. We are going to fix that,” he says.
Cytrio tells TechCrunch it will use its $3.5 million seed raise to expand its team (from a headcount of 23 and expanding to more than 40 employees in the next 12 months), to validate its product and to achieve annual recurring revenue of more than $250,000.
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