Many regulatory bodies worldwide are currently considering or are in the process of implementing new privacy rules to better protect consumer data. Securiti.ai Inc., a startup based in San Jose, California, exited stealth mode on Thursday with a platform that uses machine learning to help enterprises navigate this evolving regulatory landscape.

Securiti.ai raised a $31 million funding round led by Mayfield Fund ahead of the launch. The investment also saw the participation of General Catalyst, former Symantec Corp. Chief Operating Officer Mike Fey and other prominent figures from the enterprise technology ecosystem.

Securiti.ai CEO Rehan Jalil (pictured) himself worked at Symantec until 2018 as the head of its cloud security business. Earlier, he founded Elastica Inc., a cloud security startup that was acquired for $280 million in 2015. 

Jalil has assembled a 130-person team at Securiti.ai to automate the continuous audits, data requests and risk assessments a large company must perform to ensure it’s meeting its privacy obligations. The startup is touting its platform, Privaci.ai, as a one-stop hub for handling this work.

Privaci.ai includes a set of tools that each focuses on automating a different regulatory compliance workflow. One tool employs machine learning to help companies find out what data they store about users and where it is, while another can generate a detailed report about the data. There’s also a module that lets enterprises check if their partners are meeting privacy laws as well.

To streamline those tasks, Privaci.ai provides an AI assistant that can automatically retrieve information for compliance teams. There’s also a specialized collaboration tool workers can use to share personally identifiable user data with colleagues in an isolated workspace. 

Like most other data governance and compliance startups, Securiti.ai provides its platform as a cloud service. Jalil touched on that dynamic during an interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE video studio late last year, when Securiti.ai was still in stealth mode.

Jalil described the easy access to cloud infrastructure on platforms such as Amazon Web Services as a blessing for tech entrepreneurs. “With the ecosystem and the layer of services that is made available, it’s a big blessing for startups because all the value creation is moving up the chain,” Jalil said. “And if you leverage that, then the cost of building startups and building new things is going down.”

But though infrastructure is more accessible than it once was, some things have remained the same for startups. Recounting his time at the helm of Wichorus Inc., a network equipment maker he sold for $165 million in 2009, Jalil said that “even in those times, to do such a massive project and to go against some massive incumbents — which existed in those ecosystems — the differentiation has to be extremely high.” 

Securiti.ai is operating in a highly competitive landscape as well. The startup is challenging data governance products from Informatica LLC, IBM Corp. and other well-established players as well as fellow startups such as Alation Inc., which raised a $50 million in funding of its own earlier this year. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE