INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When Okta launched its $50 million Okta Ventures investment fund in April, one of its investments was in an early-stage privacy startup
Today, the companies announced a partnership that they hope will help boost DataGrail, while providing Okta customers with a privacy tool
option.DataGrail CEO and co-founder Daniel Barber says that with the increase in privacy legislation, from GDPR to the upcoming California
Consumer Protection Act (and many other proposed bills in various states of progress), companies need tools to help them comply and protect
“We are a privacy platform focused on delivering continuous compliance for businesses,” Barber says.They do this in a way that fits
nicely with Okta’s approach to identity
Whereas Okta provides a place to access all of your cloud applications from a single place with one logon, DataGrail connects to your
applications with connectors to provide a way to monitor privacy across the organization from a single view.It currently has 180 connectors
to common enterprise applications like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Oracle
It then collects this data and presents it to the company in a central interface to help ensure privacy
“Our key differentiator is that we’re able to deliver a live data map of the customer data that exists within an organization,” Barber
explained.The company just launched last year, but Barber sees similarities in their approaches
“We see clear alignment on our go-to-market approach
The product that we built aligns very similarly to the way Okta is deployed, and we’re a true partner with the industry leader in identity
management,” he said.Monty Gray, SVP and head of corporate development at Okta, says that the company is always looking for innovative
companies that fit well with Okta
The company liked DataGrail enough to contribute to the startup’s $5.2 million Series A investment in July.Gray says that while DataGrail
isn’t the only privacy company it’s partnering with, he likes how DataGrail is helping with privacy compliance in large organizations
“We saw how DataGrail was thinking about [privacy] in a modern fashion
They enable these technology companies to become not only compliant, but do it in a way where they were not directly in the flow, that they
would get out of the way,” Gray explained.Barber says having the help of Okta could help drive sales, and for a company that’s just
getting off the ground, having a public company in your corner as an investor, as well as a partner, could help push the company forward
That’s all that any early startup can hope for.
