Trūata CEO Felix Marx was recently interviewed by Techround.
Trūata is a privacy-enhancing data solutions provider. In today’s privacy-conscious world, organizations are having to rethink the way that they work with personal data. In order to unlock the full potential of data while retaining customer loyalty, organizations need to ensure that this data is safeguarded. We exist for this very reason – to help those organizations to succeed in our data-driven economy.
Our cutting-edge technology sits at the nexus of privacy and analytics. We engineer privacy-enhancing technologies that empower organizations to do more with their data – at scale.
We have built frictionless technology that is designed to integrate within an organization’s existing infrastructure to foster efficient, cross-departmental collaboration and enable effective data management. And by providing bespoke solutions that assist with critical data challenges, we ensure that organizations can make data useable and extract its maximum value while mitigating privacy risk. In a nutshell, we enable them to confidently tap into privacy-enhanced analytics that will fuel growth and enhance their brand reputation.
Over the past couple of years, we have invested heavily in delivering proprietary technology to market, and we have focused on ensuring we have the right structural and organizational safeguards around this to ensure our value stretches far beyond the tech itself. We have managed to build an outstanding team of leading experts from across Europe and around the world; these are top minds that span data science, engineering and cloud experts through to operations and top-tier privacy experts.
The team is integral to what we are building at Trūata, and our customers are pivotal in shaping what we build. To already have delivered a proven revenue model in the emerging privacy tech market speaks volumes for our true potential as we evolve and scale.
How did the company start?
Trūata was formed by two beneficiaries, Mastercard and IBM, in 2018. The company was purpose-built to address GDPR and its implications for analytics and insights generated from personal identifiable data.
At the time of our inception, our sole focus was addressing true anonymization by offering independent anonymization that addressed the complexities of GDPR; it was very compliance-driven. But it didn’t take us long to realize that compliance wasn’t a driver for the market; we needed to pivot to privacy per se and build solutions that delivered privacy-enhanced analytics while enabling organizations to achieve the gold-standard in meeting the highest global regulatory standards.
We had an incredible amount of IP and translated the technology we had already built into products and SaaS, which resulted in the launch of solutions such as Trūata Calibrate and our Privacy Enhanced Analytics Platform that switched on 300 issuing banks overnight. It also led us to a build out a portfolio of product offerings that meet the needs of organizations sitting right across the data maturity curve – some of which will be launched in 2021.
What started out as one employee in 2018 is now a team of 80+ employees, and that is set to reach 100 very quickly this year. We really are at an inflection point – the focus on our technology development over the past two years has led us to this point: the Year of the Customer. Our top line will grow significantly, our product offering will evolve to address growing market needs and our organization will scale in both numbers and geo-locations. It’s an exciting time, an innovative space and a fast-moving market that we’re more than ready for.
How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
2020 was a tough year for everyone, including ourselves. We had a number of prospects that were heavily impacted by the pandemic –those in the travel and automotive sector for example. At the same time, we saw traction in sectors such as retail, financial services and AdTech. Fortunately for us, 2020 was a year that raised considerable consumer and business awareness around data privacy, which played directly into our space and our product offerings.
This push for personal data privacy and increasingly global regulations saw many organizations pivoting to address and incorporate privacy into their core values and objectives. Since our technology is designed to help businesses to achieve these goals through privacy-enhanced data, we certainly benefited from the uplift in attention and interest.
More specifically, as an organization, we had to pivot and evolve in a number of ways. Operationally, pre-pandemic, we were heavily invested in face-to-face, on-the-ground customer interaction.
When you specialize in privacy-enhanced data and analytics, you specialize in building relationships that pivot around trust – and trust is much easier to build in a meeting room, in an on-site collaboration and through face-to-face interaction. So, in that sense, we had to navigate the changing workplace dynamics and find innovative ways of ensuring that we continued to provide that same level of authenticity and support to our growing customer base.
In terms of our own team, we had worked incredibly hard to build an extremely collaborative office space in Dublin; we had mastered agility and created an environment that fostered creativity and innovation. So, when the pandemic hit and we had to move to an entirely remote model of working, our HR team and our leadership team really had to invest the time in ensuring that communication and motivation continued to meet the levels we had become accustomed to.
If you had asked me before the pandemic, I would have anticipated burnout or severe operational issues after a three-month stint of remote work; however, I have certainly been proven wrong, and I think this speaks volumes for the team that we have built. Leaders stepped up and really tailored their approach to ensure that commitment, productivity and wellbeing were bolstered by effective support structures.
We ensured that people had the right tools to work collaboratively; we took a number of steps that not only kept the business on track but ensured that our people still sat at the centre of our success. The team have been phenomenal in their agility and adjustment, and I can only say how proud I am of each and every one of them.
Follow the link to read the full interview.