Zendata, a provider of AI governance and data privacy solutions, is emerging from stealth with the aim of increasing understanding around data usage. Backed by $2 million in a funding round led by PayPal Ventures, First-hand Alliance, Geek Ventures, and Altari Ventures, Zendata will continue to develop its platform while expanding its customer base.
Data risk management is a crucial component of modern business, where factors such as increased regulatory pressures, the demand for AI and LLM integrations, and the rising risk of data breaches necessitate its existence. The tools available on the market today, however, focus more on data loss prevention with an auxiliary focus on privacy and compliance, ultimately lacking vital context around data usage, according to Nara Pappu, founder and CEO of Zendata.
Other tools “don't take into account contexts that already exist within the company in things like privacy policies, data sharing agreements, and other documentation or policies,” said Pappu. “They [also] take a long time to integrate and don't offer remediation capabilities, leaving the onus on the company to go fix it.”
To help resolve this data dissonance, Zendata AI Governance leverages AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to interpret the public facing surfaces of a company—from its privacy policies on its website to third party data collection, triggered cookies, and more. Once collected, this information is used to integrate privacy by design across the entire data lifecycle, merging a company’s unique context with robust compliance.
As opposed to the manual, labor-intensive mapping of a company’s public facing surfaces done by an engineer, Zendata automates the process with greater efficiency, capable of ingesting an entire website—with over 1,000 pages—in a couple of hours, according to Pappu.
“There's been a barrier to entry…the companies that can afford this [AI governance] are the bigger guys. We want to make it easy to integrate and utilize so even if you're a mid-market company, we can identify and mitigate these risks,” Pappu explained. “It goes beyond just privacy and compliance. Even if there's no privacy regulation, with things like AI adoption and companies moving from third-party processes to more first-party driven marketing activities, [AI governance] would be a broader need.”
Further emphasizing the importance of privacy and compliance, Zendata does not touch any of a company’s personal information—only the metadata and data flows of the enterprise. No data is retained and is deleted immediately after the information is processed.
Zendata’s platform will continue to embark on ways to simplify enterprise governance, with plans to incorporate AI model evaluation and amplifying its remediation capabilities, noted Pappu.
To learn more about Zendata, please visit https://www.zendata.dev/.