Dutch-based STRM Privacy secures €3M to build data streams for the privacy age; here’s how

Rotterdam-based STRM Privacy, a data platform that brings privacy-by-design to data streams, announced that it has raised €3M in its Seed round of funding. 

The company helps collect customer data in real-time with privacy and usability built-in, and makes it directly available for analytics, data science, and machine learning applications.

Investors

The round was led by Singular and Data Community Fund, along with angel investors including Charles Songhurst and the  founders from Mendix, Algolia, and Swapfiets.

Speaking on the development, Raffi Kamber, partner at Singular, says, “There is a big and essential opportunity to help organisations build privacy-by-design, and this team is uniquely positioned to capture that opportunity, with experience in delivering data-driven products in a context where privacy matters greatly. We believe this team (including other investors) can turn STRM Privacy into a household name in the data space.”

The data layer for the privacy age

Founded in 2020 by Bart Voorn and Pim Nauts, STRM Privacy is a data platform designed around privacy. By deeply integrating data shape, consent and classification, privacy is embedded into data generation instead of as an afterthought.

The company’s founding team claim to have experienced the challenges of embedding privacy into data pipelines and creating value for customers when they worked in research, Machine Learning (ML), and data engineering at e-commerce platform bol.com and food retailer Ahold Delhaize.

Bart Voorn says, “While data privacy regulations serve a great purpose, they add coordination and uncertainty to the development process for data teams and consequently slow them down. Our goal is to ensure consumers and society can benefit from data innovation without sacrificing privacy.”

Pim Nauts adds, “We experienced how challenging it is to build for privacy and deliver value at the same time. We’re a data platform designed from privacy forward, not as an afterthought or access problem. With our approach, data teams can “just build” great data products and deserve trust from their customers, leadership and legal teams, and ship quicker and with confidence. This is exactly the simplification we aim to deliver.”

Customers cite the value of centralising data privacy: fix it once instead of point-to-point, removing constant coordination between legal and data teams. The team signed their first customers and proof-of-concepts in media and e-commerce, including the Belgium/Dutch publishing house DPG Media. For them, STRM privacy will be the data layer in personalised news feeds for millions of daily users.

“The data needed to build personalisation is potentially sensitive even if properly consented. We need to gather high quality data to train and evaluate machine learning models. With STRM Privacy, we can build with confidence to bring recommendations or search to market quickly,” says Anne Schuth, Head of Personalisation at DPG Media.