Data privacy and governance have become critical for modern enterprises as they increasingly rely on complex data systems and AI. Organizations face mounting pressure to ensure compliance with privacy regulations while maintaining the ability to innovate and scale their data operations with agility. Ethyca builds privacy engineering tools that automate how enterprises manage and protect sensitive data. At the core of their solution is Fides, an open-source privacy engineering platform, which integrates directly into technical infrastructure to embed privacy controls at the system level. Unlike traditional approaches focusing on legal teams and achieving limited compliance, Ethyca’s engineering-first solution builds trust and privacy compliance directly into data-driven products, enabling organizations to scale their data operations while maintaining robust governance.
AlleyWatch caught up with Ethyca CEO Cillian Keiran to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the compay’s total funding raised to $37.5M and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised an additional $10 million in funding as an extension of the prior Series A. Investors include Aspenwood Ventures, AVP, Des Traynor (Intercom), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Abstract Ventures, andIA Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service that Ethyca offers.
Ethyca is responsible for Fides, the world’s most used open-source privacy engineering solution. A platform built for Data Privacy and AI governance for hyper-scaled and data-driven enterprises at the forefront of data and AI.
What inspired the start of Ethyca?
Miguel Burger-Calderon (cofounder) and I saw that existing workflow automation and compliance automation solutions were promising ease of use of legal and privacy compliance teams, however the real challenges of data privacy and governance existed in collaboration between legal and engineering teams on deeply technical issues.
Ethyca created Fides to tackle the toughest problems in data privacy, AI, and trust.
How is Ethyca different?
Ethyca is responsible for Fides, the world’s most used open-source privacy engineering solution. Where other privacy technologies are sold to legal teams and achieve low levels of compliance, Ethyca focuses on tools built to integrate tightly into engineering and data flows to build trust and privacy compliance directly into data-driven products.
What market does Ethyca target and how big is it?
Regulated enterprise across publishing, retail, financial services, healthcare, life sciences and government.
Today, TAM is estimated at $45B and growing at 13% CAGR.
What’s your business model?
Ethyca delivers Fides as an open-source privacy and governance engineering platform. On top of this, Ethyca provides Fides Enterprise – a paid solution for the world’s leading institutions.
Fides is available as cloud-hosted, or self-hosted for security-focused engineering organizations.
Ethyca also provides Deployment Strategy & Forward Deployed Engineering teams to deploy, configure, and integrate Fides for organizations.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
While Ethyca anticipates a slowdown, we believe that in the medium term, this category of business issue is insulated from the major impacts of a slowdown as it is a necessary solution to accelerate data-driven opportunities for organizations.
With that said, Ethyca has taken a controlled approach to investment and is still growing 100% annually.
What was the funding process like?
As we’re all aware, the industry is very focused on AI investments. Ethyca stayed true to its mission, and while a substantial part of our roadmap and product offering includes AI, we refused to simply claim to be “AI” – as such, funding was more challenging in the current environment.
Despite this, Ethyca has raised a strong round, reflecting its current GTM progress with leading B2B enterprise investors.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
2023 – early 2024 was a deeply challenging period for fundraising outside of the AI hype cycle. For Ethyca this has meant focusing on the quality of our customer growth with large enterprise clients such as Mozilla, Ramp, Axios, and Remitly – as well as demonstrating the durability and innovation of our technology for those customers.
Ethyca’s approach to fundraising has always been about long-term resilience and durability – Ethyca will be here in a decade.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Three factors drove their investment:
- Deep intellectual property that exists in Fides makes Ethyca’s product moat truly unique.
- Year-on-year revenue growth is still 100% despite wider industry economic challenges, demonstrating the resilience of the product offering and secular tailwinds.
Customer quality as it relates to enterprise clients demonstrates that Ethyca has already built technology suitable to support the world’s largest institutions.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We expect to achieve three major milestones:
- Release 2 major product innovations to be announced end-H1 2025.
- Deploy Fides technology across 150 of the world’s best-known brands in a major client partnership
Grow the Fides open source community with the preparation of Fides’ first dedicated board
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
It is a deeply challenging market to find your business in and at the risk of repeating the often cited remarks – reduce all costs and extend runway as much as possible. Ultimately focus ruthlessly on go-to-market and sales. Investment in product innovation is pointless without real revenue.
Cut everything other than activity that leads to sales.
Appreciate the above sound trite; it’s the deeply painful act of survival that is necessary for any enduring company.
Where do you see the company going in the near term?
We believe Ethyca will continue to double revenue in the year ahead and scale exponentially. Ethyca’s role as stewards responsible for Fides is to shepherd the success of the open source tools to ensure that global organizations and developer teams can offer these tools to improve data-driven trust for wider society.
What’s your favorite fall destination in and around the city?
A walk through Red Hook on a cold day, followed by cozy Italian food at Popina – there’s no better place to be.
