Founders in Focus: Riddhiman Das of TripleBlind

Each month, we’re chatting with a founder of a company in the Okta Ventures portfolio for our Founders in Focus series. It’s a chance to take a closer look at the companies at the cutting edge of security, identity, and privacy. This month we’re speaking with Riddhiman Das of TripleBlind.

What is TripleBlind and what is your mission?

TripleBlind was created to keep your data private without sacrificing your third parties' access to perform authorized operations on your data. Whether your data includes images, text, voice, genomic, or unstructured data, TripleBlind allows for safe, regulatory compliant data exchange at the scale necessary to support, not only data insights but also AI applications.

TripleBlind’s privacy toolset achieves data privacy and compliance with no risk of data abuse. Data is kept secure and safe by one-way encryption (no decryption possible!) eliminating all potential risks without restricting the utility of the data. This allows financial services, healthcare, and any company with proprietary data sets to more easily share and work with third parties, including data bound by strict regulations (HIPAA, GDPR, and data residency).

Our mission is to unlock private data sharing and revenue opportunities for organizations, while automatically enforcing compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and other privacy regulations. 

What were you doing prior to TripleBlind that led you to this moment?

Before TripleBlind I led corporate venture capital and M&A efforts for Ant Group, the financial services arm of the Alibaba Group. In my role as head of international technology investments, I focused on deals in enabling technologies for Alipay and Alibaba worldwide, which included blockchain, artificial intelligence, security, IoT, and computing. I also spearheaded the Ant Financial and Alibaba network in Israel, Silicon Valley, and New York, helping bridge the gap between the Alibaba ecosystem and technology startups outside of China.

During that role, I surveyed the global market for trends and identified that data sharing was a fundamentally broken problem that remained unaddressed by existing solutions. That was the germ of the idea for  TripleBlind.

What is TripleBlind’s solution? What challenges does it solve? 

Today when two or more parties want to collaborate on sensitive (i.e, ​​Personally Identifiable Information), regulated data (such as HIPAA, GDPR, or CCPA), it must be decrypted, making that sensitive data vulnerable. As a result, there are intended and unintended data abuses, privacy violations, regulatory compliance hassles, and lengthy contract negotiations. The challenge that TripleBlind solves is that we make it safe to share data–no matter the situation–by allowing third parties access to shared data sets—without decryption or replication. 

Why did TripleBlind want to work with Okta?

Okta is a leader in the data privacy industry, specifically protecting identities for individuals and businesses online. Okta is a natural partner for TripleBlind due to the synergies that exist between Okta’s identity solutions and TripleBlind’s private data-sharing solution. This partnership has the potential to unlock private data sharing opportunities for organizations across the globe, rapidly expediting progress and insights from artificial intelligence and data analytics for the healthcare and financial services industries.

How is TripleBlind working with Okta, and what support do you look for in a corporate partner?

We look for corporate partners with deep synergies who are similarly passionate about unlocking data sharing opportunities while keeping the world’s most sensitive data private. 

As we continue to build out our internal processes, Okta’s process for selecting and onboarding high-value partners was attractive to us. We are eager to work with a company value-aligned from a data privacy perspective and look forward to leveraging their network and technologies to expand the TripleBlind footprint. 

What trends do you expect to see in the data privacy and sharing industry? 

The data economy is becoming increasingly regulated, greatly reducing data sharing opportunities. Data owners like banks, hospitals, point-of-sale companies, and research institutions must hire out compliance teams, spend large amounts of money on legal fees, and navigate data residency hurdles. Without privacy solutions like those provided by Okta and TripleBlind, data sharing opportunities would greatly diminish. Harnessing TripleBlind’s Blind Utilization Toolbox allows companies to share their data at scale in a zero-trust, fully compliant manner which encrypts and never decrypts inputs. Both data and algorithm providers can rest assured, knowing their counterparties never gain access to their raw input. Complying with even the strictest of current data privacy laws, TripleBlind offers companies a quicker, easier, and more cost-effective way to commercialize data and algorithm assets.

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