Announcing Transcend's $40M Series B to fix privacy for the enterprise
By Ben Brook
May 28, 2024•3 min read
Today, I’m thrilled to share that we've raised $40M in Series B funding led by new investor StepStone Group, with participation from HighlandX and existing investors Accel, Index Ventures, 01 Advisors (01A), Script Capital, and South Park Commons. This brings the total amount Transcend has raised to date to nearly $90M.
Check out the exclusive coverage of Transcend's Series B in Axios Codebook.
Since our Series A, Transcend has expanded beyond offering “a virtual kill-switch for consumers to delete data,” and is now a comprehensive Privacy and AI Governance suite of 12 products that transform how enterprises understand and manage personal data, automate privacy tasks, assess risks, and oversee AI systems.
Most companies use legacy privacy platforms built on manual workflows: interviewing data owners, data entry, and assigning operational work across teams. Transcend focuses on encoding privacy controls directly into business systems, with a novel approach centered around the full privacy lifecycle of personal data, including data discovery and classification, consent and preference management, and automating operational workflows, such as responding to data deletion and access requests.
Trying to solve today’s privacy challenges with legacy platforms is like throwing a glass of water at a house on fire—it’s hopeless. This month marks the sixth anniversary of GDPR, and we’re in the middle of another wave of comprehensive legislation with the EU AI Act and a draft U.S. federal privacy law. Yet privacy remains a fundamentally unsolved problem inside companies. Most have neither a clear view of their data, nor effective privacy controls installed directly into their systems.
And now, new AI use cases are kicking this problem right up to the boardroom door.
I fundamentally believe legacy solutions that rely on heavily operational processes cannot meet this moment. Privacy problems have to be solved at the data system level, with infrastructure that orchestrates personal data directly across all business systems. That’s how we’ve built the Transcend platform since day one, and this latest fundraise will help us meet the demand for a transition to modern privacy technology.
We’re also proud to have StepStone Group as our lead investor in this fundraise. Here’s what John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group, had to say:
“Transcend takes a radically different approach to solving modern data privacy problems by tackling it at the code level, which is one of the many reasons we’ve invested in the company. What’s also remarkable is how often they’re moving companies with complex data requirements off inefficient legacy platforms and point solutions, and onto their next-generation platform—what an incredible signal of future success.”
John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group
Transcend’s sales data has found that when placed head-to-head against the market’s legacy incumbent solution, Transcend wins in nearly 9 out of 10 cases. These companies find that Transcend’s technical platform reduces risk, enables business innovation grounded in compliant data usage, drives operational efficiencies, and crucially, helps them to build trust with their customers through responsible data practices.
But you don’t have to take our word for it –– Chad Rosenthal, AGC, Privacy & Digital Platforms at LG Electronics, said:
"Transcend implementation has resulted in significantly greater compliance. Privacy requests have increased substantially and response time has decreased by 75%. Transcend's Premier support offering is a spectacular value and the individuals I have worked with are highly knowledgeable. 'Transcend' has become part of the language of the enterprise. It is understood that applications must be connected to Transcend, particularly remarkable since we are a global company.”
Chad Rosenthal, AGC, Privacy & Digital Platforms at LG Electronics
The global data privacy software market is growing at a 40% CAGR and will be valued at $30B by 2030. This is in part due to increased public interest in data privacy in recent years, as well as the rampant adoption of AI across industries, which has added new layers of complexity to how companies use and protect data. Without appropriate safeguards, AI tools can expose companies to confidentiality, data privacy, consumer safety, brand trustworthiness, and intellectual property risks.
Transcend’s platform is uniquely positioned to support AI adoption within the enterprise, with effective data mapping and governance becoming fundamental to the responsible adoption of AI technology. For example, the recently approved EU AI Act requires AI providers and deployers to adopt strict data governance practices, publish transparency notices that accurately describe their data management procedures, and develop detailed technical documentation describing data collection, cleaning, and provenance practices. Transcend streamlines and automates all these processes, and more.
Finally, I’d like to take a moment to thank our customers for choosing Transcend as their technical privacy partner. From Fortune 500s like LG Electronics, to category leaders like Rippling, Plaid, and Hims & Hers, we love hearing stories of success from our customers on reduced risk, more efficient privacy operations, and increased business agility from great privacy.
But at the end of the day, this is about something bigger.
Through fixing privacy for the enterprise, we’re helping restore a reality in which ordinary people are not subject to extraordinary surveillance. So far, Transcend has delivered actionable data rights to over 1.2 billion people globally. With this raise, I can’t wait to get to the next billion.
By Ben Brook