Duality Technologies raises $16 million for privacy-preserving data science solutions Posted on : Oct 30 - 2019

Newark, New Jersey-based Duality Technologies, a provider of privacy-enhancing data science solutions, today announced that it’s raised $16 million in a series A round led by Intel Capital, with participation from Hearst Ventures and existing investor Team8. Duality previously raised $4 million in a November 2018 round, which together with this latest tranche brings its total raised to about $20 million.

Cofounder and CEO Alon Kaufman said that Duality will leverage the fresh funding to continue developing its secure computing platform and to expand into new segments. To this end, it recently collaborated with Intel to explore the challenges of AI workloads using encryption, which informed efforts like the open source HE-Transformer backend for Intel’s nGraph neural network compiler.

“AI and Machine Learning are transforming countless industries, but they have also created new privacy challenges that regulation alone can’t solve,” said Kaufman. “We are excited by the investment of Intel Capital, Hearst Ventures. and Team8 in Duality, and look forward to collaborating with these industry leaders in delivering innovative privacy-enhanced solutions to the market. Our mission is to reconcile data utility and privacy while unlocking a whole new world of secure collaborative business opportunities for our customers.”

Duality keeps a low profile but deals principally in homomorphic encryption, a form of cryptography that enables computation on plaintext (file contents) encrypted using an algorithm (also known as ciphertexts). It generates an encrypted result that when decrypted exactly matches the result of operations that would have been performed on unencrypted text.

Duality’s SecurePlus offering enables multiple parties to collaborate without exposing their data or analytics models. Data remains protected end-to-end even when analyzed in untrusted cloud environments, courtesy “quantum-resistant” technologies that conform to the standards laid out by the homomorphic encryption industry consortium.

Duality pitches the platform as a privacy-preserving solution for “numerous” enterprises, particularly those in regulated industries. Banks using SecurePlus can conduct privacy-enhanced financial crime investigations across institutions, the company says, while scientists can tap it to collaborate on research involving patient records. Even retailers stand to benefit with privacy-preserving data supply chain schemes enabled by homomorphic encryption. View More