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Edison Partners leads USD12m growth investment in Anonos

Private equity firm Edison Partners has made a USD12 million growth investment in Anonos, the data privacy and enablement technology platform provider with operations in Boulder, Colorado, New York and London.

The company will use the capital to drive market adoption for its pioneering Privacy Rights Management® solutions that enable organisations to lawfully use personal data and still respect and comply with data privacy rights.

Data privacy platforms are part of the USD124 billion worldwide market for information security solutions and growing at double the rate of the overall market. Data privacy is top of mind with new laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and proposed US federal privacy laws. All of these regulations include steep fines to companies for privacy violations. Anonos’ patented solution enables full compliance with data privacy laws while also allowing data to continue to be distributed, shared and combined for use in business decisions, analysis, AI and ML applications.

“Companies are waking up to data privacy as a strategic and competitive advantage. Anonos offers the most sophisticated and accurate way for companies to realise customer data insights while fully complying with the GDPR and pending data privacy laws,” says Daniel Herscovici, Partner at Edison Partners who led the investment.

The Anonos Variant Twin system leverages dynamic pseudonymisation to replace personal identifiers, such as a person’s name and date of birth, with unique de-identifiers that prevent attribution of the data to a specific person without permission. Privacy policies are digitally embedded in the data to automatically protect the data from unauthorised use when it’s shared within or outside of an organisation. The controls also enable the relinking of de-identifiers back to individuals to support lawful business purposes. Anonos calls this process Privacy Rights Management.

“Similar to how iTunes and Netflix on behalf of publishers use Digital Rights Management to control use of music and movies, Privacy Rights Management introduces businesses to data protection by design and by default to control the use and sharing of personal data,” says Anonos co-founder and CEO Gary LaFever. “At this pivotal time when policymakers and businesses have an opportunity to establish a shared ethical framework for data privacy, Anonos supplies the missing technological ingredient of digital controls that ensure lawful, ethical and sustainable data use, sharing and combination.”

“With Anonos, we’ve reconciled the fundamental tension between data privacy and data value. Business leaders, data scientists and data privacy leaders who have historically faced the either-or choice of being compliant or having highly accurate data available for decision-making can now have both,” says Anonos co-founder and President Ted Myerson. “We’re thrilled to have Edison Partners’ and Partner Daniel Herscovici backing Anonos as we expand the availability of our platform globally to foster data-driven innovation in a privacy-respectful way.”

Named as a Gartner “Cool Vendor,” Anonos provides its technology directly and via sell-through arrangements. They are actively engaged with large enterprises in heavily regulated sectors including financial services, healthcare and telecommunications. Anonos has seven granted patents and more than 70 additional pending domestic and international patents related to its technology.

“Business partners for 18 years, Gary LaFever and Ted Myerson develop technology that helps organisations turn regulation into a competitive advantage. They have operational expertise developing global businesses, a history of seeing marketplace needs before they arrive, and the vision and experience of building complex platforms in response to those marketplace trends,” says Herscovici. “We’re excited to partner with Anonos to accelerate and expand their technology platform across financial, healthcare, telecom and other data-driven industries that rely on sustainable consumer data insights.”

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