Silicon Valley start-up can ‘fingerprint’ data to spot the needle in the haystack

Sifting through humongous amounts of data for that elusive data point a company needs most can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Some times you know it’s lurking somewhere but break your head to get to it. Some other times, you don’t even know whether that piece of information, required by regulators or business strategies, really exists or not.

Here’s a Silicon Valley startup Waterline Data that promises automated data discovery, matching and tagging processes that make the job of searching quite easy. It claims it can connect the right data with right people by creating detailed catalogues for data sets in an organisation.

Alex Gorelik, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Mountain View (the US)-based Waterline Data, says its Fingerprinting solution can ‘fingerprint’ the data in an organisation, assigning a unique signature for each attribute.

The start-up, with about 40 employees, has kick-started its operations India operations with a six-member team.

Gorelik, who is in Hyderabad to mark the India launch, told BusinessLine Waterline Data’s solutions could be quite handy for companies to be GDPR-complaint.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) assigns people complete rights on their personal data. The regulations prohibit companies from illegal use of personal data. Violations could attract prohibitive fines. The regulation will come into force from May 15 this year.

“You need to know where all each person’s data is located in order to know how it is being used. It will be a huge risk (if you don’t have visibility of that information). Our solutions help organisations to become GDPR ready as they give complete visibility to the information residing within their databases,” Gorelik says.

The real challenge is to identify the data that comes under the GDPR scanner from the heaps and heaps of data that is being piled up by the hour. The next challenge is, where did you get the protected information from and where it is going.

“There’s so much data to analyse to make them GDPR ready. Automation is the only answer to make all data useful for all decision makers by bringing right data to right people. Automated discover is a unique differentiation,” Gorelik says.

Hiring Plans

“We are going to have a team of 16 employees in India by the month end and will double it by the year end. We will be around 100 people globally by the year end,” he says.

Partech Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Jackson Square Ventures and Infosys have invested about $23 million in the company founded in 2013.

In India, the firm works with companies like Infosys and Hitachi Consulting for joint-go-to-market with its solutions.

"We hired Akkiraju Bhattiprolu, a serial entrepreneur with deep data domain experience, to head our India Operations," Gorelik said. The firm tied up with Hitachi Consulting to build our Engineering team using a Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) model. The two firms will explore joint go to market initiatives.

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