The road to data ownership: We just got one step closer to our mission!
<hl>Announcing our $9.5M Series A and US expansion to empower millions of people to take ownership of their personal data online.<hl>
We’re very excited to share that we’ve raised a $9.5 million Series A round to take our product to the next level and bring a new future of equal choice and control to the internet!
This brings our total funding to $12.5 million in just a year and a half since my fellow co-founders and I started building Mine.
This is a proud moment for our entire team that now counts 16 amazing people (and is growing fast) that have worked so hard to get here. I want to take this moment to share our achievements so far and what we’re planning for the future.
Our journey
Two years after the EU’s GDPR emerged to the world of online data, one thing is clear: data regulations are here to stay. With a worldwide wave of awareness including new regulations such as the CCPA in California and the LGPD in Brazil, and growing consumer interest (87% of American consumers who now view data privacy rights as human rights ), data privacy has become mainstream and a real issue everywhere you go.
As three founders with extensive experience in cybersecurity, venture capital, and consumer companies, we understood the importance of personal data and how it can be used against people and decided it was time to give data ownership back to the consumer. In early 2019 we raised Mine’s Seed funding of $3M, as we saw more people becoming aware of the potential risks of their data being hacked or exposed but lacking the easy-to-use tools to do something about it, beyond just not using online services at all. We assembled a winning team and started working on creating our dream product.
Minimizing online exposure
There's no such thing as zero risks on the internet, and with Covid-19 moving our social and professional lives online, this is even more apparent. With recent research we’ve done showing an increase of a mind-boggling 55% in signups to digital services during worldwide lockdowns, it is clear that we all need to do something about our online data exposure, or it’s only going to become worse.
We are proud of what Mine has become, a smart data assistant that helps people discover and manage their data and continuously reduce their online exposure. With Mine, anyone can exercise its right-to-be-forgotten and send data-reclaim-requests to services they no longer use, providing peace of mind to continue to enjoy the internet, feeling safe and secure.
Achievements that make us proud:
Making a difference
A couple of months after our European launch, we’re excited to have proved not only to ourselves but to the world that there's a real demand for our non-intrusive machine-learning product. More than 100,000 users worldwide have already used Mine to take ownership of their data and sent more than 1,300,000 data-reclaim-requests to over 150,000 companies. These people have minimized their digital risks by reducing their data’s exposure. This is more than just a great statement; we have already helped people become digitally safer, with over 15,000 “Epic Saves,” cases where our users saved themselves from data breaches by deleting their data using Mine before the breach occurred. Thanks to our smart notifications and recommendations, users are effortlessly managing their data, with the average active user checking and cleaning their footprint from unnecessary services after every significant online activity, resulting in a 40% cleaner footprint on average.
Our series A- an investment to fuel our vision
Together with our fantastic team of 16 exceptional employees, we work hard to bring you the BEST product to take ownership of your data. We are here to drive real social impact and a revolution in the consumer data market. Our product is far from perfect, and there is still a long way to go, but thanks to our users’ feedback, we continue to improve.
After our successful launch in the European market earlier this year, we are now ready to take the next steps to achieve our vision. We are proud to have sparked enough interest from investors to complete the whole funding process from start to finish (all through Zoom) amidst the widespread first COVID lockdown and crisis. A true testament of the investors' confidence and trust in their product, team, and mission of creating a new standard of data ownership and to launch our product in the US.
We believe that the diverse group of impressive investors that are joining our journey demonstrates our holistic approach to achieving our goals. Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund) led the funding with their first investment in an Israeli company, joined by e.ventures a trusted German authority with 20 years of experience in the European investment market and US insurance giant MassMutual Ventures. These new names join our existing investors Battery Ventures and Saban Ventures, who believed in us since the beginning and helped us bring Mine to life.
In addition to our Series A and launch, we are excited to announce that David Hoffman, Chief Privacy Officer at Intel, and a renowned global privacy expert, is joining our Advisory Board to strengthen the company’s strategy and position in the privacy market.
Our future plans:
Choice, transparency, and dynamic consent - the future of data ownership
We don’t want to stop here. Our next plan includes advancing our "Dynamic Data Consent" concept: We believe the future of data ownership is about allowing consumers to set their own terms and draw the line about what data they are willing to share with companies based on the value they get in return. By giving users the choice to delete specific data, such as location, etc. we can take privacy beyond the binary, outdated view and into a new future of data ownership.
Creating a bridge between consumers and companies - a new data future
After getting over 100,000 signups and facilitating over 1,300,000 deletion requests to companies worldwide, we identified something crucial in the market is still missing. Companies are putting a lot of effort and time into their data-privacy processes, but they often do not fit their customers’ needs and are hard to execute. Simultaneously, the right-to-be-forgotten processes can be cumbersome for companies, showing the market need for a standard that will work for both sides. To create a better experience for consumers, companies have to be part of the change. Even more so, with a reclaim-completion rate of 60%, it's clear that companies want to be part of the change.
This is why we are partnering with companies to create the "Privacy Network of the Future.” We invite every company to sign up, define their privacy data context needs for every Data Subject Request (DSR), and Mine will then make sure they get every DSR validated, verified, and ready to be fulfilled. This simple integrated solution will standardize the privacy rights experience for companies so they can focus on what matters most.
At last, I want to thank our exceptional team, investors, and, most of all, our amazing users who’ve trusted us and created this movement together with us- we wouldn’t be here without you.
Stay tuned — there are a lot more exciting things to come!