Digital workflow management startup Integral announced today that it has raised $6.9 million in new funding to protect sensitive health data and further develop its automated expert certification software.

Founded in 2020 as Promeed Inc., Integral offers a platform that streamlines dataset creation by automating the de-identification and compliance certification process. Geared toward the medical and healthcare industry, the platform combines healthcare data such as medical records, health histories and genetic information with nonhealthcare data such as social media activity, purchasing history and location data to give researchers a holistic understanding of a person’s health and lifestyle.

Although the combined data is said to enhance healthcare research and improve health outcomes, it can pose a significant threat to people’s privacy by potentially exposing sensitive information about individuals. Allowing healthcare companies to process and protect that data is key to Integral’s mission.

The company argues that before its platform came along, companies were forced to rely on expert certifications conducted by consultants. That included a manual, human-led process that often took several months and left usable data on the table. Integral provides higher-quality data and expert “certification-as-a-service” software, enabling customers to work with better data in nearly real time.

“Combining healthcare and nonhealthcare data can transform healthcare research and innovation,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Shubh Sinha. “We’ve proven and will continue to prove that speed, accuracy and privacy can be treated equally, even when working with highly regulated data. We created Integral to achieve this goal, ensuring personal information is protected and people’s privacy rights are respected.”

The seed round was led by Haystack Partners LLC, The General Partnership LP and Virtue Ventures LLC, with Also Capital LLC, Array Ventures LP, Caffeinated Capital LLC, GreatPoint Ventures LLC, LiveRamp Ventures LLC and Venrex Capital LLC also participating in the round.

Integral was last in the news in June when it debuted an open-source tool that can analyze software teams’ code and automatically highlight areas for improvement. The tool, known as Robin AI, uses artificial intelligence to scan code files for potential issues.

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