Over the past decade, data has become increasingly important to enterprise software, and more recently its role has become even more prominent with the rise of large-scale language models. At the same time, regulations around data usage have increased accordingly, making finding ways to stay compliant more important and difficult than ever.
That's where Codified, an early-stage startup incubated last year within venture capital firm Madrona Ventures, comes in. The company, founded from the ground up by data veterans to solve data compliance issues, today announced a $4 million seed round.
Yatharth Gupta, the company's founder and CEO, believes that even though data is at the heart of today's technology, businesses struggle to control access to it. “Every company has a lot of data. They want people to use this data. “This is a very difficult problem for people to solve,” Gupta told TechCrunch.
“So our mission at Codified is simple: We want to help businesses innovate by making data easily accessible in a compliant way within the enterprise.”
In Gupta's view, many large companies create policies and try to implement them in different ways, but software is too rigid for today's use cases, especially when policies need to change. We see it as leaving us vulnerable. He can do this by translating policies into code that can be implemented in different ways, can be connected to different applications that need access to the data, and can be easily modified as new customers or categories of users emerge. We want to change the situation.
“We allow you to create policies using natural language, a declarative way, or the UI. Choose whichever method you prefer. However, once you create those policies, there are many ways to implement them. “It was very effective. It was easy to change,” he said.
To that end, the company allows customers to set criteria such as whether they have received security training in the past 365 days or are part of a team already working on a sensitive project. Ultimately, this allows companies to understand who their employees are, the applications they use and the projects they participate in, rather than relying on creating groups to base their rules on. You can now set hard-coded data access rules based on The problem with the group approach, he says, is that the group can't always keep up as people move around and change jobs.
Mr. Gupta's background includes 15 years at Microsoft in several positions, including running the Azure Databricks product, and several years in product and engineering at Singlestor. Both jobs involved him being heavily involved with data, he says, and he understood the kinds of problems he was trying to solve at Codified.
The product is still in development. Mr. Gupta is working with several design partners to refine his ideas, and in addition to his five full-time employees, he works with six contractors. He hopes to have a release candidate ready later this year.
Investors in today's round include Vine Ventures, Soma Capital, and Madrona Venture Labs, which Codified incubated last year.