Through our decade-long partnership over his two successful companies, I have realized that Rehan Jalil is the definition of a serial entrepreneur – a big thinker and successful team builder with an ability to see around corners and walk through walls. Starting in 2005, every seven years, he and his teams have found a technology inflection point that could dramatically improve consumers’ lives, and built a company around it. We are honored to lead the Series A for his third company, SECURITI.ai, which debuts today.
We first partnered with him in 2007 on his company WiChorus. It targeted the promise of putting the Internet in users’ hands by providing Smart 4G infrastructure, and once the iPhone was introduced, that became a reality. WiChorus grew into a leader and was acquired by Tellabs. His next company, Elastica, dramatically improved the productivity of business users by allowing them to stay secure and compliant when using sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps. It gives businesses unequaled cloud app security with the deepest visibility, tightest data security, and strongest threat protection. After establishing a new market category, Elastica now resides within Symantec, where it represents one of the fastest-growing business lines. Rehan and team’s newest venture is aiming at solving one of the biggest problems facing society today – how businesses can build trust equity with consumers, by allowing them to own and guide the use of their personal data.
Beginning Jan.1 2020, California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), goes into effect requiring enterprises handling personal data of California residents to comply with many requirements, including consumer data requests. Companies face a $7,500 fine for each violation, and the bill allows class-action lawsuits, effectively crowdsourcing enforcement of regulation. By an estimate, that’s 500,000 businesses at risk.
Based on his explorations with early customers, Rehan has found that responsible enterprises want to be known as the trustworthy custodians of personal data. However, full compliance with dozens of data privacy regulations like CCPA is extremely complex. Similar to how SecOps was a key driver a few years ago, he believes that a new category called PrivacyOps will emerge to address this problem. PrivacyOps is a combination of practices, cross-functional collaboration, automation, and orchestration that increases an enterprise’s ability to comply with a myriad of global data privacy regulations reliably and with greater speed. PrivacyOps allows organizations to fulfill Data Subject Request (DSR) obligations reliably in hours instead of weeks, at a fraction of the cost of the manual operation, while significantly reducing the risk of financial penalties and keeping their customers delighted.
Over the last six months, Rehan and an all-star team of 130, drawn from leading companies such as Symantec, BlueCoat, Elastica, and Cisco, have built a delightful product that is already attracting interest from leading enterprises. PRIVACI.ai is the first full-stack, AI-powered PrivacyOps platform. Data privacy regulations have diverse requirements and enterprises often struggle to fulfill requests for consumer data that frequently sprawls across hundreds or thousands of internal and third-party systems. PRIVACI.ai simplifies request fulfillment with seven comprehensive modules that help companies operationalize compliance with personal data-centric privacy regulations like CCPA in one system. Integrated into the “PrivacyOps” infrastructure platform is the robotic assistant – Auti. The bot’s plain language interface answers questions about various aspects of an organization’s privacy compliance, a person’s sensitive data, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) risks, etc, and can also assist in doing actually doing important tasks like DSR fulfillment. The PRIVACI.ai dashboard is elegant and easy to use.
Mayfield has been guided by a people-first philosophy for fifty years. It has been inspiring to watch Rehan and team tackle hard problems over the last decade and succeed in changing the way we work, live, and play. By leveraging the power of AI, and building a delightful product, I’m confident that PRIVACI.ai will become the gold standard for PrivacyOps, a movement that will become mainstream in enterprises going forward.
We are excited to begin this new journey together, and look forward to helping Rehan realize his vision to protect our right to privacy.
Originally published on Navin’s LinkedIn.