Brief - The Hustle

Thanks to California’s new rules, compliance companies keep on comin’

Written by Conor Grant | Jun 30, 2020 10:56:48 AM

Privacy laws in California may have been a pain in the SaaS for big companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Uber, which have all recently made efforts to make data more transparent for their users.

But those same laws also created a new market for digital privacy — and startups wasted no time rushing in (our colleague Steph wrote about that in Trends this week). 

Now, privacy-focused startups are BOOMING

According to an NBC report, the number of privacy-providing startups increased from 44 in 2017 to more than 259 this past October.

These startups offer similar services, such as data scrubbing, compliance consulting, and software that enables companies to see all their customer data and make it available to their users. 

And these startups also have weirdly similar names. Don’t believe us? *clears throat* Some examples, per NBC:

  • Privsee, Privally, Privaon, Privitar, Privacera 
  • DataFleets, DataGravity, DataGrail, Dataguise, DataTrue 
  • TrustArc, OneTrust, Mighty Trust, trust-hub, HITRUST 

Anyway… don’t expect this privacy boom to end any time soon

Some of these privacy companies are already big (unicorn big, baybeee). Georgia-based OneTrust was valued at $1.3B in a funding round last summer.

And the entire industry is also expected to continue growing. A MarketWatch report from last year projects that the data protection as a service market will grow from $9.6B in 2018 to $94.3B by 2027 — a nearly 10x increase in less than a decade.