Privacy and data governance startup Relyance AI Inc. today launched out of stealth mode with $30 million in new funding.

Unusual Ventures and Menlo Ventures led the Series A round, while John Vrionis, co-founder and managing partner of Unusual Ventures, led the company’s seed round.

Relyance AI pitches itself as the first privacy and data governance operations solution to offer transparency and visibility in real time all the way down to the source code. According to the company, an organization can quickly and accurately answer essential privacy questions and ensure compliance and governance by mapping requirements directly to the ultimate source of truth: the codebase. In the company’s words, “PrivacyOps can finally operate at the speed of DevOps,” a reference to the discipline of speeding application development by closely teaming programmers and information technology operations staff.

The startup is addressing the issue that legal and data protection teams historically have had limited visibility into digital operations. Developers and data scientists are constantly creating and updating internal applications, microservices and data pipelines while DevOps is deploying them. With various teams adopting new tools and decommissioning old ones, the gap between what is really happening in the business and what the legal, data protection, privacy and compliance teams expect to happen grows wider.

Relyance AI provides a platform for an entire organization to manage privacy compliance and data protection seamlessly. Using machine learning, the platform determines an organization’s contractual requirements and the actual operational reality of data processing down to the source code. With this foundation of trust, data protection teams have the visibility and insight they need to take action on privacy issues in real time, the company said.

Features include live data inventory and mapping, universal records of processing activities, intelligent insights, data subject access requests and vendor lifecycle management.

Although only now launching out of stealth, Relyance AI already has a range of customers, including Dialpad Inc., Patreon Inc., Samsara Inc., ThriveTRM LLC, True and dozens of others.

“Given the importance of data privacy and the emergence of strict new regulatory regimes like the CCPA, GDPR and others, it’s surprising how little compliance teams know about the moment-to-moment flow of personal data throughout their organization,” Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and partner at Unusual Ventures, said in a statement. “Engineering teams move fast, unaware of new data protection requirements, and the rest of the company is always racing to catch up. Relyance AI unites these teams, giving them a common platform that ensures robust data privacy and continued trust in the brand. It’s like putting a privacy expert inside the code.”

Image: Relyance/LinkedIn