Dentsu Ventures Invests in Skyflow, the U.S.-Based Data/AI Privacy Company

Dentsu Group Inc. (Tokyo: 4324; ISIN: JP3551520004; President & Global CEO: Hiroshi Igarashi; Head Office: Tokyo; Capital: 74,609.81 million yen; hereinafter referred to as "the Company") announced that Dentsu Ventures Fund II (hereinafter "Dentsu Ventures"), the Company's corporate venture capital fund, has made an investment in Skyflow Inc. (Headquarters: CA, USA; CEO: Anshu Sharma; hereinafter "Skyflow"), a pioneering company that offers data privacy vaults built to radically simplify how companies isolate, protect, and govern their customers’ most sensitive data.

Skyflow has raised over $30M in its Series B extension round, led by Khosla Ventures with Dentsu Ventures participating as the first Japanese fund to invest.

Maintaining compliance while protecting personally identifiable information (PII) can be a significant challenge for many organizations. Even with the best of intentions, PII can end up dispersed across various storage systems, making the maintenance of robust security and compliance measures a difficult task to manage. In addition, adoption of LLMs is increasing across the market even though there are few data protection mechanisms in place, putting compliance, security, and privacy at risk.

Through its global network of data privacy vaults, Skyflow provides a comprehensive solution for companies around the world handling customers’ sensitive data and looking to securely implement LLMs and meet complex data localization requirements. With Skyflow’s data privacy vault, companies can protect sensitive data while maintaining its usability for various use cases such as support, analytics, and marketing across their organizations. This enables companies to apply governance policies across their entire tech stack at scale. Skyflow supports nearly a billion records of user data for global customers and processes more than two billion API calls quarterly. Dentsu’s investment comes on the heels of many new and existing residency laws all over the world- including the newly passed DPDP act in India.

“Regional data privacy and security bills are popping up everywhere and it’s difficult for companies to keep up with, especially as they grow into new markets. The PDP Law in Indonesia was passed in 2022, but it’s officially being enforced this year. Companies are going to be forced to start prioritizing data privacy in an intentional way. With Skyflow, sensitive data is isolated and protected in a Skyflow Data Privacy Vault and we leverage fine-grained governance controls to control who has access to what data, when, where, and for how long.” said Manoj Awasthi, CTO of Julo, a fintech company based out of Indonesia and a client of Skyflow.

“We see an urgent need for companies to make privacy a core part of their technology stack as LLMs and AI hurdle forward, ingesting more and more personal data,” said Anshu Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Skyflow. “Skyflow is the only solution that allows companies to build privacy by design into their technological infrastructure without overhauling anything – anywhere in the world.”

Going forward, Dentsu Ventures will help Skyflow expand its business and consider creating synergies with the data privacy-related initiatives of dentsu globally.

Profile of Skyflow

Profile of Dentsu Ventures Fund II

Name:	Dentsu Ventures Fund II
Total fund capital:	10 billion yen
Year of Establishment:	2021
Period of operation:	10-year period from April 2021 until March 2031
Investment regions:	Global investments both within and outside Japan
Investment stages:	Wide range of stages from seed-stage investments through to later-stage investments
URL:	https://dentsu-v.com/en/

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Contacts:　　　

Media Inquiries:
Jumpei Kojima
Deputy Global Chief Communications Officer
Dentsu Group Inc.
Email：group-cc@dentsu-group.com