Skyflow expands its regional footprint by adding generative AI support to its data privacy tools

Skyflow, a data privacy startup, announced on Friday that it has expanded the number of markets in which it offers data residency support for businesses that need to keep certain information within defined boundaries. In today's market, you probably can't keep data from customers in the EU, for example, in South America and vice versa. Companies must therefore take care to keep certain information at home, in the market from which it originates.

Skyflow started life as a tool to help businesses store personally identifiable information, or PII, in a secure way. Its API helps companies "manage all of the difficult privacy, encryption and data issues associated with storing PII and other forms of potentially radioactive data for its customers," we wrote the last time we covered. company.

The startup, which recently closed a $45 million Series B at the end of 2021, can now meet data residency requirements in Japan, India, Indonesia and Bahrain. The work, Skyflow CEO Anshu Sharma told TechCrunch+, will allow software companies to offer their services in more markets, faster, while meeting local regulatory requirements for data location and secure storage. personal information of users.

Sharma argued that his company's recently expanded regional data storage capabilities will provide ways to help other companies avoid the complexity of spinning up their own data storage and security frameworks just to launch in new markets.

Skyflow's work to support more regions didn't come cheap. Sharma said the work had a "high fixed cost", which Skyflow could afford as it "raised a lot of money", allowing it to "pay infrastructure and operating costs" for its customers. . (By the way, that's what venture capital is for: building before revenue in hopes of garnering outsized market share.)

Given that every tech company, whether a startup or a large enterprise, wants to rack up all the growth they can in the currently slow market, you can see why Skyflow is expecting a return on its spending. If software companies continue to push to reach new markets to sell their services, they will have to manage an array of data regulations and rules themselves. Or they can work with Skyflow or one of its competitors - EverVault, Protegrity, among others - to help meet local requirements.

So far, Skyflow has found notable international adoption. Sharma told TechCrunch+ that his company does more than 40% of its current business with non-US customers. The CEO was quick to point out—retrieving S-1 documents on our call—that some well-known software companies sported a low double-digit share of their revenue from international markets when they went public. It will be curious to see if greater regional support pushes this number above 50% over time; we will contact the startup again in a few quarters.

Skyflow initially focused on offering its services to the fintech and healthcare vertical markets. However, it recently created a version of its data storage service to support generative AI services. So when we had Sharma on the phone to talk about data residency, we also asked a few questions about market demand for LLM-related software services.

Via the startup, how it plans to sit between company information and LLMs . Image credits: Skyflow

First of all, we wanted to know if the startup had built the tool using...