Among members of the U.S. intelligence community, the sensitive data they handle could literally mean the difference between life or death for thousands of people.

That may explain why a small startup called Immuta Inc. with 70 employees and $20 million in Series B funding is beginning to gain traction in the data-governance market.

Founded in 2014 by three executives who formerly worked for U.S. intelligence, Immuta built its software around data governance solutions for customers in finance, healthcare, government and manufacturing. Current clients include Daimler AG, Cerberus Technology Solutions LLC, and government consultancy LMI.

And the founders have come to know lawyers really well.

“We worked with more lawyers in the intelligence community than you could ever imagine,” said Matt Carroll (pictured), chief executive officer of Immuta. “So, the goal was always how to make a lawyer happy. If you figure out that problem, you’ll have some success. And I think we’ve done it.”

Carroll spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed key technology driving Immuta’s solution, how the software has helped one company in the healthcare space and why an explosion in data-governance policies demands an automated solution (see the full discussion with transcript here).

Turning laws into code

Through its collective experience in the highly regulated environment of intelligence and military operations, Immuta’s founders came to appreciate the balance between speed and safety in the handling of data. The company’s technology is a software platform that digitizes laws and regulations into active code that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

“Think of Immuta as a system of record for the chief information security officer or the line of business where I can connect to any data on any infrastructure or compute layer,” Carroll said. “They can build any policy they want on any data in the enterprise and enforce it globally. We can audit who is using what data and why.”

One of Immuta’s customers is Cognoa Inc., a leading pediatric behavioral health company. Cognoa sought Immuta’s help for a major study to predict where children fall on the autism spectrum, a project that required lots of training data to build machine-learning models and find patterns in young people.

“We provide a platform where we can anonymize all of the data for them,” Carroll said. “We can guarantee that there are blind studies. We’re providing a value add to innovate in areas using machine learning that regulation would have stymied.”

500,000 policies per query

As data has become the rocket fuel powering businesses today, the challenge confronting enterprises is how to handle the most sensitive data, which is also often the most valuable. Enterprises want that data immediately to drive revenue, but governance limits, such as General Data Protection Regulation in Europe or recently enacted privacy controls in the U.S., are forcing companies to seek new solutions.

That’s the prime market opportunity for Immuta.

“How do we give the line of business the ability to access that data instantaneously, but also give the CISO and governance teams the ability to take control back?” Carroll asked. “We found that, on average in large enterprises, any query at any time might have over 500,000 policies that need to be enforced in real time. We have to automate; no human can handle all of those edge cases.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE