An Israeli data privacy company, Mine Inc., has announced that it has completed a $30 million Series B fundraising round led by Battery Ventures, PayPal Ventures, as well as the investment arm of US insurance giant Nationwide, with the participation of a third investor. In addition to Gradient Ventures, Saban Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, and Headline Ventures, which are all existing investors, Google's AI fund Gradient Ventures also joined the round of investment.
Using artificial intelligence and specifically natural language processing, Mine is capable of scanning your inbox to identify which companies have access to your personal information, as well as allowing you to delete any information that you had no reason to have access to.
There were a lot of concerns that people had concerning GDPR, and the product sparked a lot of interest: initially free, the startup managed to rake in about 5 million users in just a few weeks.
Next, the company was able to expand its user base to include business users and enterprise applications.
Mine can figure out all of the locations where the end user is installing and using customer or business data from a scan of the user's inbox and log-on authenticity. In this instance, it struck a chord with the privacy officers who are responsible for keeping companies in compliance with privacy rules and that resonated with them as well.
150 clients are using Mine’s data privacy and disclosure solutions to protect their data. These companies include Reddit, HelloFresh SE, Fender, Guesty, Snappy, and Data.ai. By raising this capital, the Company will be able to fund its ongoing operations in the coming years as well as expand its global operations, including expanding the company's MineOS B2B platform into the US and expanding its offerings to the enterprise market.
With 35 employees, the company is in the process of hiring dozens of developers, QA professionals, and machine learning professionals to be based in Israel.
Founded in 2019, Mine is a company headquartered in Tel Aviv, with the company's founding members being CEO Gal Ringel, CTO Gal Golan, and CPO Kobi Nissan.
Since the company started, its vision has been to provide companies and individuals with ease of access to privacy regulations. It has been two years since the company's vision around its MineOS B2B platform has sharpened, and it aims to provide the company with a Single Source of Truth (SSOFT) of data within its organization, enabling them to identify which systems, assets, and data they have within their organization.
In every organization, this process, known as Data Mapping, is one of the most important building blocks which serves as a basis for a variety of teams, including legal and privacy teams, data teams, engineering teams, information technologies, and security teams. It is the most important building block for many teams within a company.
As Ringel said, "The funding was complete at the end of the second week of October, just one week after the war had begun."
As a result of the difficult market conditions of the past year, we have managed the company very carefully and disciplined since March last year while reducing monthly expenses and boosting revenue significantly to a rate of millions of dollars in annualized return on equity (4x growth in 2023) which has allowed us to achieve extraordinary metrics that have attracted many investors to the company.
There is no doubt that mineOS is one of the greatest open-source operating systems out there, and as such it has hundreds of enterprise customers, including Reddit, HelloFresh SE, FIFA and Data.ai, and Data.ai it announces $30 million in Series B funding to continue its development.
There are two leads in this round, Battery Ventures (from the financial giant) and PayPal Ventures (from the payments giant) as well as all of the previous backers that were involved in this round, including Saban Ventures, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), MassMutual Ventures, and Headline Ventures.
Although Mine has not disclosed its valuation, the co-founder and CEO, Gal Ringel, told me during his recent interview that the company has increased in valuation three times since its last fundraising back in 2020. (The previous round was $9.5 million after the company had only 100,000 users and no revenue.) Mine has raised over $42.5 million in funding.
A part of the new funding will be used for both sales development surrounding Mine's current offerings, as well as more funding for R&D. In line with this, Mine intends to launch two new products in Q1 that cater to the explosion in interest and use of artificial intelligence. One of these products is designed for data privacy officers who are prepared to comply with the plans of regulators to adopt artificial intelligence laws shortly.
The data protection tools market is not limited to Mine, as it should be.
The fact that the feature sits close to other data protection activities is why it is more likely to be challenged by other companies in the same arena – for instance, OneTrust, which offers GDPR and consent gate solutions for websites, and BigID, which is a provider of a comprehensive set of compliance tools for data usage and compliance. Ringel said Mine has a strong competitive advantage over these as it is designed with an emphasis on becoming user-friendly, so it can be adopted and used even by people who have no technical background.
