This French startup wants to use your data without opening it

Cosmian, a deep tech cryptography and blockchain platform to power a fair and secure data economy, has just finalised a seed round of €1.4 million. The funding was led by Elaia, joined by Acequia Capital, Financière de Blacailloux (Fiblac) and business angels including Florian Douetteau (CEO, Dataiku), Julien Lemoine (CTO, Algolia), Guillaume Amblard (former Global Head BNPP Quantitative Research) and Marc Jalabert (former General Manager Microsoft Europe). Elaia is leading this round via a co-investment of its two active funds: Elaia Delta Fund and PSL Innovation Fund.

Cosmian’s ambition: Solving the private data paradox

Based out of Paris, Cosmian builds the first private data intelligence platform, which makes it possible to encrypt the data and to obtain the result of the calculations performed on these encrypted data without ever revealing the underlying data.

Founded in 2018, Cosmian aims to become the first global company able to industrialise functional and homomorphic encryption schemes, embedded within Business Applications, across a large scope of industries. With respect to protection and privacy of the processed data.

Breakthroughs in French public research

The company relies on deep tech technologies of encryption. In particular, it exploits the latest advances in functional and homomorphic encryption that make it possible to launch queries / calculations on the encrypted private data without ever revealing the underlying data in the clear. The platform is developed in collaboration with the cryptography team of David Pointcheval – world leader in functional encryption research – at the computer science department, common to the ENS, the CNRS and the Inria, at the Paris University Sciences and Letters.

A growing data protection and privacy market

Moreover, Gartner projects global business security spending to reach $96.3 billion in 2018, and by 2020 more than 60% of companies will invest in multiple data security tools, such as prevention tools data-driven data loss, encryption, auditing and data protection, an increase of about 35% over today.

Sandrine Murcia, CEO, Cosmian:

With Cosmian, we are solving the “Paradox of Private Data”: we allow to perform calculations on encrypted data without ever allowing access to the underlying data. Our solutions are aimed at companies that use private data, sensitive to their operation or the improvement of their existing services – while ensuring their compliance throughout their production chain. Using Cosmian’s technologies both protects the data and significantly reduces the risk of non-confidentiality associated with its use.

Xavier Lazarus, Partner, Elaia:

We had already identified the scientific birth of homomorphic and functional ciphers that allow to calculate on encrypted data and thus to handle them without having to break the confidentiality rules that would be inherent to them. When the experienced team of Cosmian came to present their ambitious but realistic project that makes these technological advances available to the economic and social world, we didn’t hesitate; we rarely meet technologies capable of changing the world and Cosmian is!

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