Accel is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm that powers a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a business.  Accel’s vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries. Accel-backed companies include Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, DJI, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Lookout Security, MoPub, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, Vox Media, and others.

Accel

South Park Commons is a community designed to transform the chaos of possibility into the clarity of conviction for the most talented technologists, builders, and domain experts figuring out what's next. South Park Commons fosters an environment that encourages people to take risks and launch their next venture.

South Park Commons

122WEST is a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage internet and software investments. The firm seeks to invest in Information technology, software, internet of things, SaaS, fintech, mobile, infrastructure, big data, and cryptocurrency sectors. It was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Script Capital

A founder-centric early-stage fund investing in enterprise data opportunities.

Octave

Index Ventures is a venture capital firm based in London, San Francisco, and Geneva, helping entrepreneurs turn bold ideas into global businesses.  Since 1996, Index has partnered with exceptional entrepreneurs who are using technology to reshape the world. The companies they’ve started include Adyen, Deliveroo, Dropbox, Farfetch, King, Slack, and Supercell.

Index Ventures

StepStone provides investment services to institutional investors focused on achieving excess net (after fees) risk-adjusted private equity returns. StepStone builds private equity portfolios by accessing the market through a combination of fund investments, co-investments, and secondary purchases.

StepStone Group

Founded in 1988, Highland Capital Partners is a global venture capital firm focused on putting the entrepreneur first.  With offices in Silicon Valley, Boston and Shanghai, Highland has raised over $3 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 225 companies, resulting in category-defining businesses across consumer and enterprise technology.  Investments include 2U, Ask Jeeves, Bromium, Gigamon, Leap Motion, LevelUp, Lycos, MapQuest, Nebula, QD Vision, Qihoo 360, Quattro Wireless, RentJuice, Rent the Runway, Starent Networks, Sybase, Violin Memory, VistaPrint and WePay.  Highland also serves as a mentor for future entrepreneurs through Summer@Highland, a program that provides students and university-affiliated startups with the environment and resources to take their initiative to the next level.

Highland Capital Partners

01 Advisors is a venture and advisory firm helping founders go from building a product to building a company. The firm was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

01 Advisors

Transcend

Transcend is a data privacy infrastructure that makes it simple for companies to give their users control over their personal data. Personal data is disorganized, hard to spot, and stored across many systems. That makes offering data rights like deleting data. Transcend automatically fulfills data subject requests inside companies, across all of their data systems and vendors. Transcend also provides their end-users with a control panel, or “Privacy Center”, hosted at privacy.<company>.com where users can manage their privacy preferences, export their data, or delete it. By making data subject requests painless for companies, Transcend is putting users everywhere in the driver’s seat of their personal data.

<div>The company provides infrastructure that organizations can use to manage data privacy and handle personal data across all internal databases and applications. The platform enables automation of data subject rights requests by integrating with the organization&rsquo;s databases. When fulfilling data subject requests, Transcend collects the relevant data in an encrypted format, which can then be decrypted only by the user who initiated the data subject request.</div>

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

Digital Privacy Tools

Transcend is a data privacy and governance platform that helps companies manage personal data, automate privacy tasks, and oversee AI systems across their tech stacks. The company offers a suite of products designed to streamline privacy operations by encoding controls directly into business systems.

Transcend Raises $40 Million for Data Privacy Platform

Transcend enhances its privacy platform to address current and future compliance challenges

Transcend raises $40 million to address data privacy issues

Transcend named a Leader in Data Privacy Management in G2 Summer 2022 Reports

Transcend Unveils Major Expansion to Its Privacy Platform

Transcend named as a Major Player in the IDC MarketScape Data Privacy Compliance Software 2023 Assessment

Transcend Launches Actionable Data Mapping Functionality to Eliminate Manual Compliance Work for Companies at IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit

TransCEND Virtual Data Room Overview: features, pros, and cons

Promises increased productivity, cost-efficiency, and competitiveness in the legal industry

LegalTech

Transcend Welcomes Krishna Bhat as Vice President of Product

<div>
 
 The company provides infrastructure that organizations can use to manage data privacy and handle personal data across all internal databases and applications. The platform enables automation of data subject rights requests by integrating with the organization&rsquo;s databases. When fulfilling data subject requests, Transcend collects the relevant data in an encrypted format, which can then be decrypted only by the user who initiated the data subject request. 
 
 
 The platform came out of the beta phase in 2019 and has processed more than 20,000 access, erasure, and opt-out requests as of June 2020. The company also provides the Privacy Center, which features a user-facing portal to manage user privacy preferences.&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 Transcend&rsquo;s most recent funding round was in June 2024, where it 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/29853">
 raised
 </a>
 USD 40 million in Series B funding led by StepStone Group. The funding is expected to be used to further enhance the company&rsquo;s digital privacy platform.
 
 
 
</div>

<div>
 
 OneTrust provides compliance solutions that leverage AI tools and automation across all areas of privacy compliance. OneTrust Athena, the company&rsquo;s AI-powered solution, provides 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&rsquo;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 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 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16852">
 addition of certification automation
 </a>
 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 partnerships
 
 
 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.&nbsp;&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 The company employed 3,000 people, served more than 12,000 customers (including 75% of the Fortune Global 500 companies), and its solutions are backed by 200 patents, as of January 2022. In June 2022, OneTrust 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11018">
 laid off 950 employees
 </a>
 (~25% of its global workforce) across its departments in Atlanta (US), Bengaluru (India), and London (UK), due to worsening global financial crisis and to balance between growth and profitability.
 
 
 OneTrust&rsquo;s 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20390">
 most recent funding
 </a>
 was in July 2023, where it raised USD 150 million in a round led by Insight Partners at a valuation of USD 4.5 billion. The company expects to use the combined funding to scale its platform to meet increasing demand.&nbsp;
 
 
 This funding was raised at a lower valuation, down from the USD 5.1 billion OneTrust recorded during its December 2020 Series C round (USD 300 million), however the company reports it has doubled ARR to USD 400 million, grown customer numbers from 7,500 to over 14,000, and increased headcount from 1,500 to over 2,000 over the same period.
 
</div>

OneTrust

<div>
 
 Privitar provides a platform that enables companies to leverage personal data in their databases for analysis without compromising the end user&rsquo;s safety and privacy. The company&rsquo;s solutions handle and process data compliant with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
 
 
 The company&rsquo;s platform provides de-identification solutions to enable the use of personal data while maintaining data utility. Use cases include business intelligence, insights, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) analysis, etc. The platform also includes features to manage secure data sharing and invisible data watermarks to track data movement throughout the organization.
 
 
 In July 2022, Privitar 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11586?industryIds=34">
 acquired
 </a>
 the UK-based regulatory intelligence platform Kormoon to use the latter&rsquo;s repository of data privacy rules across 46 jurisdictions and automate policies in its own data provisioning platform. The company deemed this repository as a &ldquo;strategic asset&rdquo;&mdash;something that would take it years to build on its own. Kormoon provides a regulatory intelligence platform that analyzes the data usage behavior of companies to determine and automate necessary actions to achieve compliance with privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. Privitar expects to launch Kormoon&rsquo;s regulatory intelligence to users of Privitar by the end of 2022, although it&rsquo;s unclear whether Kormoon&rsquo;s offerings will continue to be sold as a separate product in the long term.
 
 
 In June 2023, enterprise data management firm Informatica announced 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19444">
 it was in talks to acquire
 </a>
 Privitar.
 
 
 As of November 2020, Privitar employed over 200 staff and has offices in the UK, the US, Singapore, and Poland.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 Privitar expanded the relationship it had with HSBC through its Series C fundraise, as HSBC was the first customer for Privitar in 2016. In addition to HSBC, Privitar also has other customer-turned-investors such as Citi.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 Privitar&rsquo;s most recent funding round was in June 2020, where it raised USD 7 million as a Series C investment led by HSBC Venture Capital Coverage Group. With USD 80 million raised in April 2020, its total Series C funding now amounts to USD 87 million. The company intended to use the funding to accelerate product development, hire additional staff, and focus on international expansion.
 
</div>

Privitar

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

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

Transcend is a data privacy and governance platform that helps companies manage personal data, automate privacy tasks, and oversee AI systems across their tech stacks. The company offers a suite of products designed to streamline privacy operations by encoding controls directly into business systems.
Transcend's platform covers the full privacy lifecycle, including continuous data discovery, mapping, classification, consent management, and automated workflows for privacy requests. It enables companies to understand where personal data resides, implement privacy controls, respond to data subject access requests (DSARs), and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
A key differentiator of Transcend's approach is encoding privacy directly into data systems rather than relying on manual processes. This allows for end-to-end automation, reducing the need for repetitive tasks and minimizing compliance gaps.
Transcend's technology comprises over a dozen integrated products, including Data Inventory, Data Lineage, Silo Discovery, Structured and Unstructured Data Discovery, DSR Automation, Consent Management, Preference Store, Privacy Center, Contract Scanning, Assessments, Pathfinder for AI governance, and Prompt Manager.
As of May 2024, Transcend has raised USD 90 million in funding from investors like Accel, Index Ventures, StepStone Group, and others. The company partners with Fortune 500 companies, Global 2000 firms, and fast-growing startups, delivering actionable data rights to over 1.2 billion people globally. Some of its customers include LG Electronics, Plaid, Brex, Hims & Hers, and Rippling.

Anecdotes is a compliance technology company that offers Compliance OS, the first operating system designed to meet the needs of modern compliance and governance. Compliance OS serves as a central workspace where teams can collaborate seamlessly on compliance activities. It employs a multi-layered architecture that collects data from various sources, processes it, and integrates it into different applications within the platform.
Compliance OS automates manual compliance tasks, enabling continuous compliance monitoring. It provides a unified view of an organization's compliance posture, allowing teams to manage all aspects of their program from a single platform. The platform offers customizable frameworks, requirements, and controls, ensuring precise alignment with an organization's specific needs. As of January 2024, Anecdotes claimed to have over 120 integrations with identity providers, security tools, collaboration software, ticketing systems, and cloud infrastructure platforms.
Compliance OS transforms compliance from a burden into a driver for growth by providing business-impacting insights to leadership. It caters to the needs of fast-growing companies, publicly traded organizations, and enterprises of all sizes. As of January 2024, Anecdotes' customer base included notable names like Lifelabs, Snowflake, Coinbase, Aristocrat, SoFi, Grafana, and Payscale.
In June 2023, Anecdotes released the industry's first toolkit for secure implementation and consumption of generative AI, comprising risk registers, policy templates, and a dedicated AI framework. The toolkit aimed to assist organizations in integrating generative AI while maintaining compliance and mitigating associated risks.

Anecdotes

Exterro is a legal governance, risk, and compliance (Legal GRC) software company that provides an integrated platform to automate the interconnected processes of privacy, legal operations, digital investigations, cybersecurity response, compliance, and information governance. The company's flagship product is a comprehensive Legal GRC platform that empowers legal teams to proactively and defensibly manage their Legal GRC requirements.
Exterro's software leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to generate summaries, translations, and labels, guiding reviewers to insights faster. It offers industry-leading e-discovery, privacy, and data governance solutions with unmatched ingestion and processing speeds. The company's forensic toolkit, FTK, pioneered the field of digital forensics software and is widely trusted for its ability to acquire and analyze data admissible in court proceedings.
Exterro's solutions are designed to be easy to use, requiring no expensive certifications or training courses. The company's customizable workflows ensure that each project matches clients' unique needs and preferences. Exterro's project management software provides real-time dashboards, improving collaboration and eliminating fire drills with external partners by coordinating activities and connecting stakeholders through auditable workflows.

Exterro

Evisort is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform that enables organizations to streamline and automate various stages of the contract management process. At its core, Evisort leverages proprietary AI trained on millions of contracts to extract and analyze critical data points and clauses from agreements. This provides users with valuable insights, identifies risks and opportunities, and facilitates data-driven decision-making.
Evisort's flagship offering, Document X-Ray, is a generative AI solution that allows organizations to customize their AI models based on natural language queries. By simply posing questions like "Are any rebates or discounts available?", users can train the AI to automatically populate relevant data fields across their contract portfolio. Document X-Ray goes beyond traditional clause extraction by generating summaries, calculating dates and amounts, assigning risk scores, and more.
Complementing its AI capabilities, Evisort provides a comprehensive suite of features spanning the entire contract lifecycle. This includes intelligent contract drafting with clause libraries and in-app editing, automated workflows for approvals and negotiations, e-signature integration, and robust reporting dashboards. Evisort seamlessly connects with enterprise systems like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP Ariba, enabling organizations to share contract data across departments and drive strategic business decisions.
In December 2023, Evisort achieved a significant milestone by creating the first large language model (LLM) specifically designed for legal agreements, further elevating its AI prowess in the contract intelligence space. The company has garnered recognition from industry leaders, with Microsoft lauding its ability to train custom algorithms, and Workday highlighting its effectiveness in rapidly extracting and sharing contract data.
Key customers and partnerships
Evisort boasts an impressive client roster that includes prominent global corporations such as Microsoft, BNY Mellon, NetApp, Western Union, and Workday. These industry leaders have leveraged Evisort's AI-powered platform to streamline their contract management processes, gain visibility into contractual obligations, and drive strategic business decisions.
In May 2023, Evisort announced a strategic integration with ServiceNow's Legal Service Delivery application. This collaboration combines Evisort's innovative contract data extraction capabilities with ServiceNow's advanced workflow capabilities, enabling enterprises to automate manual processes, deliver valuable contract data across departments, and drive enterprise-wide business workflows powered by AI-driven connected contract data.

Evisort

Icertis is a leading provider of AI-powered contract intelligence solutions. The company's flagship offering, Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform, turns contracts from static documents into strategic assets by structuring and connecting critical contract data. This enables organizations to automate processes, maximize contract value, ensure compliance, and manage risk through insights derived from their commercial agreements.
Icertis serves a diverse range of industries, and its solutions are used by major enterprises such as Google, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, and 30% of the Fortune 100 companies. The ICI platform processes over 10 million contracts worth more than USD 1 trillion across 90+ countries and 40+ languages.
Key product capabilities of the ICI platform include advanced AI for contract data analysis, industry-specific vertical solutions, integrations with enterprise systems like SAP and Microsoft, and robust enterprise-grade features for handling complex contracting needs at scale. In March 2023, Icertis earned top ratings from analyst firms like MGI Research and IDC MarketScape for its innovative product strengths and industry leadership.
In October 2022, Icertis launched a Contract Intelligence solution tailored for the Banking and Financial Services industry to address challenges like regulatory compliance, risk management, and contract authoring complexities. The company has also expanded its vertical solutions to sectors such as healthcare, Medical Technology, Consulting & IT Services, Technology, and Wholesale & Distribution.

Icertis

Platforms that connect lawyers to clients (includes online listing, reputation, comparison, and booking systems) and those that support networking among lawyers.

Includes tools for intelligently extracting information from documents and flagging anomalies, the automated creation and simplification of legal documents, filing and serving documents online, and exchanging documents for discovery. Also includes providers of white-labeled digital legal documents and notarization tools that allow the notarization of documents online, assuring their security, authenticity, and integrity.

Tools to manage and digitize the legal practice of individual lawyers and law firms. Features include intake management, legal case/project management, team and client management, team collaboration, client communication and engagement, document storage systems, time and expense tracking, and billing and invoicing.

Includes platforms that provide legal content from various publishers; tools that support legal teams with conventional and contextual search of relevant case law and authoritative sources; and tools that search, analyze, and organize copious numbers of documents and large datasets. AI-based legal research systems replicate the work of a human legal research assistant and are referred to as AI lawyers/attorneys, digital lawyers/attorneys, or virtual lawyers/attorneys. Analytics tools include those that support lawyers with tracking trial cases, receiving email alerts for cases, and predicting trial timelines, along with those that mine big data to determine lawyers' success rates, when to settle, and when to press the advantage. It also includes tools for corporations that predict the outcomes of litigation.

Includes tools to manage large volumes of data; identify key issues for litigation, internal investigations, and compliance projects; and select relevant web content for use as evidence.

Software solutions that support regulatory compliance. Includes platforms that promote compliance among employees by providing simplified summaries of applicable legislation on-demand, and those that support compliance teams with tracking changes in legislation, sharing and tracking documents within the organization, and collecting evidence. IP/trademark management platforms include those that protect brands from online counterfeiting, digital piracy, and distribution fraud by scouring online marketplaces and social networks, along with those that offer simplified licensing solutions using digital rights technology.

Includes platforms that offer contract lifecycle management from their creation, negotiation, compliance, review, and approval, to execution, tracking, and monitoring. They can automate the processing of routine contracts with a high degree of accuracy and may include technology to organize, understand, and extract data from contracts. Also comprises tools for identity verification, electronic signatures, electronic registered delivery, and electronic time stamp.

Includes commoditized law solutions and do-it-yourself legal services for consumers (individuals, families, and business owners), as alternatives to engaging a lawyer or law firm. Examples include platforms that aid with immigration and asylum applications, consumer claims, class actions, closing funding rounds, and drafting simple contracts, wills, and divorce documents. Litigation finance platforms facilitate third-party funding for litigation. Such pre-settlement funding allows victims to pay their legal fees while awaiting a resolution.

AI reviews documents and contracts and derives insights from multimedia data sources

<div>
 Transcend, a data privacy platform, has raised USD 40 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Stepstone Group and also saw participation from HighlandX and existing investors like Accel and Index Ventures. To date, Transcend's total external funding stands at approximately USD 90 million.
 The newly acquired funds will be targeted towards enhancing Transcend's platform.
 Transcend has made tremendous growth after its last funding. It expanded from a privacy kill switch to now offering a suite of 12 distinct products. These products aid enterprises in understanding and managing personal data, automating privacy-related tasks, assessing risks, and managing AI systems.
</div>

Transcend

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