Samooha, a startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration platform, today announced it has raised $12.5 million in a funding tranche backed by Altimeter Capital, Snowflake Ventures and others. CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said Samooha’s first infusion of cash will go to product development and hiring. The plan is to grow the startup’s team from his 14 developers to around 20 by the end of the year.
So what exactly does Samooha do, you might be wondering? Simply put, the platform enables businesses to securely share, collaborate, and gain insights from their data and their partners, regardless of the underlying cloud or data stack.
It’s not a new concept. “Data clean rooms” are touted by both tech giants and start-ups as the ideal solution for sharing sensitive data across computing environments. Just a few years ago, Harbr raised $38.5 million for technology that helps companies securely exchange and share large amounts of big data. InfoSum and Decentriq also offer secure data sharing tools, but Amazon Web Services recently launched a new data clean room product (properly called Clean Rooms) aimed at organizations that regularly share data with external partners. ) was launched.
Samooha’s differentiation relies heavily on the Snowflake ecosystem. This is not at all surprising given Snowflake’s involvement in funding the startup. Snowflake’s native app, Samooha, provides a no-code UI that customers can use to access and build clean room apps. The underlying trust boundary of Snowflake’s native app framework provides a secure computing environment, Sivaramakrishnan explained in his TechCrunch interview. Eliminate the need for data migration.
Image credit: Samuha
“Security guarantees are technically enforced through both encrypted multi-party computing technology and user-defined policies such as approved query templates. and secure analysis,” she added. “Think of highly intuitive collaborative product experiences like Slack. You are learning, sharing, and collaborating on data that you and your partner own in that channel or room.
Samooha intends to target sectors it believes to be particularly underserved, including healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail and entertainment. Especially the media can be profitable. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 80% of advertisers with $1 billion or more in media budgets will use data cleanrooms.
Sivaramakrishnan claims Samooha already has Fortune 500 customers, but did not name them. The pandemic, she said, made the pitch easier because it revealed the need for her to collaborate on data in a safe and secure way across industries.
It probably depends on your industry — an August 2022 survey by Hub found that over half of marketing professionals have never used a data clean room. However, Samooha’s early traction suggests that there is some truth to Sivaramakrishnan’s claims.
“Broadly speaking, leveraging customer, consumer and enterprise data is a reality for every industry and use case. sir,” said Shivaramakrishnan. “The pandemic has highlighted the need for data collaboration in a safe and secure manner across multiple industries including healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics. Combined with our commercial model, it gives us confidence that we are uniquely solving critical enterprise data functions and that we have the potential to withstand the headwinds.”
