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Omnisient
Building a Privacy-Preserving Environment for Data Collaboration
Anton Grutzmacher, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer and Jon Jacobson, Co-Founder, Chief Executive & Technical OfficerAs these trends prevailed, two passionate players realized that privacy was becoming a significant obstacle in the data collaboration space. This was when Jon Jacobson and Anton Grutzmacher embarked on their entrepreneurial journey, laying the foundation of Omnisient, a data collaboration software (SAAS) company. Their platform makes business-to-business data sharing quick-to-implement, affordable, secure, and compliant to the global privacy regulations, creating a trusted environment within the data collaboration space. It offers the space to virtualize data in a cloud premise with complete control over when and how people or partners access it and what they can acquire and use it for. With Omnisient, organizations can unleash the potential of data without having to worry about the hassles of data breaches or compromised customer privacy. “We are paving a way for complete reinvention of how the data economy will be working with better privacy, more efficiency, and control for businesses that have historically always shared data,” mentions Jon Jacobson, Co- Founder, Chief Executive & Technical Officer of Omnisient.
Omnisient brings to the fore a cloud-based secure data collaboration platform that enables clients to share data and perform multiple analytics without compromising customer’s personal information. Omnisient makes it possible to anonymize and de-identify personal information within their environment. This allows concealing data like customer name, surname, ID, or contact number by creating tokens. The tokenization of data represents each customer without having to use any personal identification information. It’s the first step in the process and actioned via the desktop application on-premise of the first-party data owner. The de-identified data is then ready to be loaded by multiple parties into Omnisient’s cloud environment. Businesses can share, virtualize and perform their analytics in this cloud space.
We are paving a way for complete reinvention of how the data economy will be working – with privacy-preservation, greater efficiency, and more control for businesses that have historically always shared data
Omnisient also focuses on the interoperability of its platform capabilities to effectively link the datasets to be leveraged across different organizations. The platform offers ownership over the data and the models—how those are built, trained, and deployed appropriately to their optimum potential in other spaces. For instance, the Omnisient platform might make retail data available to a bank for credit risk scoring. It becomes essential to retain the anonymity of personal information and offer interoperability features to help the bank garner retail data to a maximal effect.
What differentiates Omnisient is its responsive anonymization, complying with regulations. Though data collaboration is a fast-growing sector, there aren’t many mature players in the market, which gives them the edge. Unlike some bureaus and data collaboration companies that ask clients to share data to an external environment for deidentification, Omnisient allows performing the same in the owner’s environment. “We have developed our own processes and technology that starts on premise so that the user’s personal information or business identifiable information doesn’t leave the environment of the business they contracted with as a subscriber or a member,” adds Jon. Additionally, the packaging of the advanced analytical capabilities into the platform allows organizations to bring in their data science teams to analyze the data in their environment. Omnisient is presently in the process of patenting its unique and novel solution.
The proven track record of Omnisient’s solution has earned an extensive client roster across multiple industrial sectors. There have been media owners who wished to sell their media inventories to advertisers. The advertisers often require understanding the audience in-depth, which is contingent on detailed customer information, but some media owners do not ask for customer login details. Omnisient’s technology made it possible to identify the customer profiles effectively by anonymizing the data and overlapping it with a bureau partner. Enriched data which then helped the media owners to offer advertisers improved targeting capabilities and reach.
The company also has multiple clients across banking and retail, healthcare, insurance, and so on who have successfully leveraged data anonymity for better customer experiences without compromising personal information.
The idea of transforming the conventional data ecosystem has come a long way in assisting businesses to garner risk-free data collaboration, eliminating the shortcomings of the conventional processes. Their unique technologies to address the challenges of data partnerships and alliances between organizations have been key to eliminating any concerns of privacy impeachment. “It is essential to have all the right data in the right place and execute different functions from an analytical perspective, whether it is visualizing data, or building models, while ensuring complete privacy,” mentions Jon.
Omnisient News
TechCrunch select Omnisient as one of world’s top 200 game-changing startups
TechCrunch conducted an extensive review of nearly 3,000 early-stage startups from across the globe to curate the final list of 200 participants for their Startup Battlefield 200 competition, held annually at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, USA. The Startup Battlefield 200 is renowned as the foremost startup competition, where these 200 startups receive training and the opportunity to pitch their ideas in front of investors and TechCrunch editors.
This year's cohort of Startup Battlefield participants encompasses a wide range of industries, including artificial intelligence (AI), software as a service (SaaS), fintech, security, sustainability, and space exploration.
“One of the cool advantages of being a first-party witness to the thousands of companies that come through our application pipeline every year is that we see emergent trends bubbling up far sooner than most do. It’s a huge privilege to be able to see the future this way and one of the most exciting parts of our job,” says Matthew Panzarino, Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch.
Omnisient is a Data Collaboration platform focused on privacy preservation. It incorporates state-of-the-art cryptography, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to empower Financial Services Institutions (FSIs) in securely and compliantly utilizing emerging consumer data sources. Through Omnisient's platform, local banks have successfully harnessed retail shopper data to identify 3.2 million individuals as creditworthy, a feat previously hindered by limited background information, thereby expanding access to credit for these individuals.
Speaking about the fintech category of the competition, Panzarino added, “Fintech is going deep over the next year building infrastructure in huge but un-addressed world economies rather than over-indexing on the western markets. Whatever holdover grip that foreign banking and social norms have on those systems is getting unraveled by startups that are creating new ways for populations in those markets to engage with finances.”
“We are in the midst of speaking to investors locally and overseas to raise Series A funding for international expansion and further development of our technology,” says Omnisient CEO, Jon Jacobson. “Being invited to join TechCrunch’s Start-up Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt is not only international recognition of the disruptive nature of our platform and the impact we are having in growing financial inclusion, but also a fantastic opportunity for us to fine-tune our pitch and share our story with an audience of US investors.”
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 will be held from Tuesday, September 19 - Thursday, September 21 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.