First Rays Venture Partners supports visionary early-stage founders. The firm invests in future-forward ideas that will disrupt the enterprise stack and makes initial investment in Seed, Pre-Series A, and Series A stage startups focusing on B2B enterprise software. It specializes in helping startups to find early customers in AI, enterprises, or developer communities and focuses on B2B themes of AI, Cloud-Edge-Data orchestration, and automation in the enterprise stack.

First Rays Venture Partners

Y Combinator is a startup accelerator that invests in a large number of startups twice a year. It created a new model for funding startups. Twice a year, the company invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups. The startup accelerator works intensively with the companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day when the startups present their companies to a carefully selected, invite-only audience.

Y Combinator

The world of financial services is transforming and more ready than ever for thoughtful disruption. The combination of permanent structural changes to the global financial services industry and readily accessible infrastructure will unlock empowering financial and technology innovation at across the FIRE sector - from finance, to insurance and real estate - through products and services that are fair, transparent and give consumers and businesses full control of their hard earned money and the data tied to it.  LaunchPad Capital builds and invests in pre-seed and seed stage Fintech companies.

Launchpad Capital

Over the last decade, LoftyInc Capital has invested over $25m into over 150 of Africa’s fastest growing enterprises, including three unicorns, and attracted c.USD1.5b in follow-on funding into our portfolio companies. With an overall goal to prioritize long-term growth and sustained benefits to communities, we have also built an extensive ecosystem in the process, spanning tech hubs, angel networks, and talent platforms. Across all funds, we have realized 14 exits and achieved 3.8x net DPI on our LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund 2.

LoftyInc Capital

Pascal Capital is a boutique venture capital firm investing in early-stage technology companies. The company provides founders with best-in-class recruiting services with a focus on executive and engineering positions.

Pascal Capital

Asymmetry Ventures invests in scalable early-stage companies with exceptional defensibility.

Asymmetry Ventures

Strategxy Ventures LLC is an early-stage investment company, providing seed capital to promising startups around the globe. By investing directly, as well as co-investing through angel syndicates with our own seed investment funds, we have created a unique model that allows our firm to invest in high-potential startups through a diversified portfolio approach curated and managed by our team.

Strategxy Ventures LLC

Blotout

Trusted enterprises use Blotout’s consented single-tenant CDP and analytics stack to thrive in the post-cookie era.

Blotout is a customer data platform to solve data loss and build trust by capturing and activating customer data for enterprises. The company's core product is EdgeTag; it works by building a customer CRM and lifetime ID graph at the edge using serverless computing environments.&nbsp;

New data privacy regulations have opened up space for a new wave of compliance-focused startups.

Digital Privacy Tools

Blotout Announces New Partnership with Fastly to Improve Meta Ad Spend with Blotout's EdgeTag

Cloudflare

To leverage its serverless capabilities to launch a new product named "Blotout EdgeTag" which enables users to send data to the Facebook Conversion API directly from their domains.

The innovative cost dynamics of serverless computing allow more customers onto the cloud without breaking the bank.

Serverless Computing

Businesses and organizations helping programmers transition to serverless platforms by reducing client dependency on vendor-specific offerings.

Blotout is a customer data platform to solve data loss and build trust by capturing and activating customer data for enterprises. The company's core product is EdgeTag; it works by building a customer CRM and lifetime ID graph at the edge using serverless computing environments.&nbsp;The company emphasizes a privacy and compliance-by-design approach, aiming to help marketers achieve their goals while reducing exposure to the increasing costs of growth marketing in a cookieless world. Blotout's solution is positioned as a way for businesses to remain compliant with various privacy laws and customer preferences through a first-party approach to user identification. The platform is designed to work across multiple advertising platforms, with full integration into Facebook and expanding capabilities across Google and other channels. Blotout also offers the ability to back up data to cloud services like Cloudflare R2 or Amazon, providing customers with raw data storage options.Key customers and partnershipsBlotout has formed partnerships with several companies to enhance its offerings. In May 2022, it partnered with Pixated, a performance marketing agency, to provide clients with advanced measurement, attribution, and activation capabilities for the cookieless era. This collaboration aimed to help address challenges in ad performance measurement brought about by privacy changes and the demise of third-party tracking.In June 2022, Blotout announced a partnership with Fastly, a global network provider. This collaboration aimed to leverage Fastly's Compute@Edge serverless computing environment to enhance EdgeTag's performance and reach. The partnership was focused on helping marketers improve their Meta ad spend ROI in a challenging online advertising landscape.Blotout has also integrated with Yotpo, allowing merchants to send retargeting messages such as "abandoned cart" or "product viewed" based on onsite events identified by Blotout. This integration is designed to make businesses remain compliant with various privacy laws while effectively identifying users for marketing purposes.

OneTrust provides compliance solutions that leverage AI tools and automation across all areas of privacy compliance. The company’s AI-powered solution sees widespread use, providing automation in the areas of data discovery, data subject rights management, consent management (with a user-facing preference center for greater control), data protection impact assessments, third-party risk management, incident response reporting, and monitoring.The company also provides regulatory research software that companies can use to train staff and even benchmark their own privacy programs. The company’s Government Records Request Automation solution helps government organizations intake requests, automate data discovery and redaction, and provide a secure two-way communication portal that demonstrates compliance with FOIA, PRR, and the Privacy Act. OneTrust’s products were backed by over 200 patents as of September 2024.OneTrust has strengthened its position in the digital privacy space through several acquisitions in recent years. In March 2021, OneTrust acquired DocuVision, an AI-powered data redaction platform to bolster its data subject rights capabilities through automatic redaction of non-relevant sensitive information. During the same month, OneTrust acquired Convercent to enhance its platform through advanced ethics and compliance capabilities, and helpline and disclosure management. OneTrust acquired the security assurance and certification platform Tugboat Logic in September 2021, to automate its InfoSec assurance and certification processes. Other notable acquisitions include Privacy Core e-learning, DataGuidance, and Integris Software.In March 2023, OneTrust announced the addition of certification automation to the OneTrust GRC and Security Assurance Cloud. This solution which combines automation, pre-built policies and controls spanning 29 industry frameworks, over 100 integrations, compliance content, and expert guidance enables customers to simplify and streamline compliance tasks according to OneTrust.Key customers and partnershipsAs of September 2024, OneTrust said it served over 14,000 active customers, including 75 of the Fortune 100. The company claims it serves notable organizations from all industries, with Adobe, Walgreens, Samsung, and Mearsk among its customer base.OneTrust entered a partnership with Dow Jones Risk and Compliance in April 2023, to incorporate risk and compliance data into its third-party due diligence solution.

OneTrust

CENTRL provides automated risk management and privacy management solutions. Through its Privacy360 platform, the company provides solutions to identify compliance gaps, automate data discovery, manage data subject rights requests, consent management (with a user-facing preference center), carry out impact assessments, third-party risk management, monitoring, and reporting.

CENTRL

HighSide provides a secure communications platform for organizations, enterprise archiving solutions, data discovery, and supervision tools in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, etc. In 2019, the company announced the acquisition of Hotshot Technologies, a secure team messaging platform.

HighSide

SecuPI provides a patented platform enabling organizations to achieve compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. The platform achieves this by providing multiple features to protect data such as pseudonymization, consent controls, audit logs, streamlining breach notifications, etc. SecuPI’s platform is deployed in organizations in the banking, insurance, telecommunications, and health industries.

SecuPi

JoinPrivacy is a B2C solution that allows users to manage their personal data from the websites they use, all from one place.

JoinPrivacy

Solutions to prevent the tracking and collection of the personal data of end-users.

Encrypted communications and data exchanges for internal and external collaboration around sensitive data.

Tools to provide compliance with privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, and carry out tasks such as data discovery, data governance, consent management, Data Subject Rights (DSR) management, Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) and managing incident response as mandated by these privacy regulations.

Synthetic data generation, data de-identification and anonymization, and other solutions for managing sensitive data.

Storage infrastructure for holding data in compliance with regulations such as GDPR or data residency requirements.

Central management of data access and data privacy and security policies.

Uses AI/ML to automate workflows such as data discovery and data classification

Uses generative AI to provide conversational recommendations to users to remain compliant with privacy regulations

Solutions in this industry hub are offered under a B2B SaaS model

Blotout

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