We spoke with the CEOs of companies that participated in the recent AWS Startup Showcase: Innovations With CloudData and CloudOps to find out what drives them and learn about their visions for the future. This is the sixth feature in our CEO Startup Spotlight series.

WireWheel Inc. Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Justin Antonipillai (pictured) was working for the Obama Administration when he began to see that data privacy was becoming a very big deal. 

As Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, he played a key role in several of the department’s top priorities, including co-leading the United States’ negotiating team in reaching agreement on the E.U.-U.S. Privacy Shield with the European Commission and on the issues of privacy, cybersecurity and encryption, as well as a number of other digital economic initiatives.

Antonipillai saw that data privacy was moving from being a checkbox compliance item to a multifaceted challenge that would impact human rights, trade and national security. 

“I was helping to represent intelligence agencies around the world on the Edward Snowden disclosure issues and then started handling all the major data transfer agreement discussions about personal information moving from Europe to the U.S.,” he said. “Because privacy is governed by country specific laws, it becomes something that countries actually negotiate over. It was in every trade deal, and it was becoming part of every commercial agreement.”   

Having represented the U.S. on data privacy all around the world during the Obama Administration, Antonipillai said it was clear that privacy was a fundamental human right, a critical trade issue, and a bet-the-company issue for almost every organization. 

Data privacy issue escalates; building trust becomes paramount

Data privacy issues continued to escalate with the migration of data from hard drives and servers to new software-as-a-service platforms and into the cloud, where it is distributed very differently compared with 20 years ago. And it is understood that when a company takes customer data, that data is given to many other companies as a natural part of business. 

“Most people don’t feel like they have any idea what happens to their data. They don’t feel like they have any control over it,” Antonipillai explained. “As a result, they’re probably unwilling to share their data so that problems could be solved in a faster way. As an example, if they actually believed they could change their minds and get their data back from a company or the government, we might have been able to open up businesses faster by developing a COVID vaccine more quickly.”

Antonipillai emphasized that it is fundamental for people to gain control of their data and make companies more accountable for how they’re using personal information. Increasingly, organizations are including privacy as a key feature of their software because they realize that the more they can build trust, the more likely customers will continue using their products and services. It has even become a strategic issue for many major brands who promote the fact that they have higher levels of privacy protection in place, Antonipillai explained. 

“Helping people feel as though they can trust a brand and that their data is protected is the key issue WireWheel is tackling,” he added.

Modernizing the compliance process

Recognizing that companies needed a way to build privacy into their products, users wanted to have more trust when offering their data, and problems could be solved more quickly in that scenario, Antonipillai and his co-founder Amol Deshpande decided to start WireWheel.

“To tackle privacy, you really need to understand privacy protection, the technical stack, and how data is used, stored and processed,” Antonipillai said. “We saw that we had the team to do that.”

The WireWheel Data Privacy and Protection Platform was built with a deep, first-hand understanding of what it takes to align privacy and data protection teams with software development, data science, security teams and outside advisors to modernize the compliance process. The platform automates the tasks required to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act.

Two core offerings include its Trust Access Consent Solution, a cloud-hosted end-to-end system that helps companies manage the relationship with customers and build trust by allowing customers to control the use of their private information. The second offering, Privacy Operations Manager, helps companies understand which systems are holding personal data, what kind of personal data there is, and document it in a way that it can be checked to determine if the company is compliant or not.

Antonipillai explained that its approach is unique in three ways. 

“First, we’re thinking about both the consumer experience as well as the internal side of a company in the same view, because we see it as all part of the same problem,” he said. “Secondly, in order to solve this problem, you have to be able to connect to a lot of systems within a company and deliver a standup full experience that looks and feels like their brand. They can connect it to their backend systems, and we make it easy and configurable for a company to do that. And third, we gain privacy insights so that our system can tell you that this is something you need to do to comply, and here’s how to do it. These three distinguishing features enable us to help companies at scale.”

WireWheel’s platform, built on AWS, supports large global enterprises such as telecoms and major technology companies. However, in the last year, the company introduced an Essentials Package, which is a scaled-down version of its enterprise offering. 

“Our goal is to enable any company to have the same kind of privacy infrastructure that’s being used by larger companies in the world,” Antonipillai stated.

A social justice calling

WireWheel’s goal reflects Antonipillai’s passion for helping those who are in need, a common thread throughout his academic and professional career. As a college student, he had the opportunity to intern for the public defender service in Washington, D.C., where he was a court investigator. His responsibilities included interviewing witnesses in the community and in jail facilities.

“It was an incredible experience in and of itself, but seeing the need for help in that world, I knew that when I graduated and started practicing law that I wanted to do something to help the community,” he said. “When I was looking at law firms, I really focused on those that were supportive and had a similar view.” 

Antonipillai landed at Arnold and Porter, a Washington D.C., firm that offered pro bono work to those who couldn’t afford its services. Donating about a thousand hours a year, he did a lot of work with kids who needed help navigating their way through the educational system due to learning disabilities or who had been placed in the juvenile system and needed legal assistance, as well as others. 

While he was at the firm, he eventually founded and supervised the Appellate Legal Clinic, which specialized in civil rights and social action. The clinic offers help to those who can’t afford a lawyer or need help in the criminal justice system and attaining the right representation. 

“I ended up handling some major cases and became very invested in individual rights and enabling people to have access and help at the right level,” Antonipillai said.

In 2014, he was recommended to the White House by Virginia senators, and an opportunity to work with Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker came about. He served first as Deputy General Counsel from 2014 to 2016 and then Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs for the next two years.

“I got incredibly lucky,” he said. “Secretary Pritzker is one of the best leaders I have ever worked with. She is incredibly smart, has a handle on a ton of different issues, is flexible and thoughtful but also knows how to set a plan, enable her leaders and manage at scale.”

Antonipillai considers Pritzker to have been a key mentor in that regard, influencing his idea of leadership today. 

Collaboration leads to WireWheel

Antonipillai’s activities for the Department of Commerce included focusing on helping people work with their data safely, and in that capacity he got involved in technology. 

“I met some really incredible tech leaders, including Amol Deshpande, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, and we started collaborating,” he explained. “I also met former rocket scientist Chris Getner, who comes from the virtual reality world, and so we decided to bring all of our combined expertise together to create the company.” 

Deshpande is WireWheel’s chief scientist, and Getner is the company’s chief solutions architect.

Antonipillai remarked that they have been fortunate with the backing of investors New Enterprise Associates, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Fund, PSP Growth, Grotech and Sands Capital Ventures. In February, WireWheel announced $20 million in Series B financing led by ForgePoint Capital, bringing the total capital raised by the company to $45 million. 

The company said that the funding will be used to speed its go-to-market plans and extend its SaaS platform’s leadership as the only solution built specifically for ease of use by privacy professionals and tailored to the needs of engineering and data governance teams.

“I love it because we’re in the middle of one of the hardest things companies are trying to accomplish,” he said. “People in the privacy world are so committed to this issue and getting it right; not just internally, but the companies we’re working with as well. We feel like we’re tackling something that’s truly meaningful.”

Antonipillai looks forward to building a team as well, explaining that they try to be aligned on certain core values, two of which are kindness and empathy. A commencement speech by author and professor David Foster Wallace inspired the idea of asking employees to shift their perspective on the everyday world, whether it’s trying to understand a team member’s perspective, or a customer’s, and avoid slipping into a default way of thinking. 

Looking ahead, Antonipillai explained: “In the privacy world, there have been three different states that have now adopted their own privacy laws — California, Virginia and, most recently, Colorado — and this is going to drive a lot of changes for companies. Our number one goal is to make sure we do really well by our customers and help more companies with these base-level challenges.”

Photo: WireWheel