We are thrilled to announce our lead investment in the Series Seed round for Codified, a modern AI-powered policy-driven data governance platform. It is a pleasure to partner with Vine Ventures, Soma Capital, and Madrona Venture Labs, where Codified was initially conceived and incubated. It has been exciting to work with Codified’s CEO and Founder Yatharth Gupta since last summer in building the company. Yatharth is an experienced and capable product leader with years of experience working with enterprise customers on their data platform strategies.
As we’ve gone from traditional analytics to “big data” to machine learning and now to generative AI, one central idea has remained constant: data is a critical and valuable enterprise asset. Regardless of the method, data fuels innovation and enables informed decision-making. Across this same progression, data privacy and security concerns have grown significantly. Unfortunately, tech news regularly brings us stories of how data has been compromised, often with significant business and privacy-related impacts. So, while we work with more of our data to drive business value, it is imperative we have proper governance in place such that applications and users have the access they need – but only to the data they need and only for the times when they need it. Codified was founded to address these challenges – to provide seamless and secure access to data and, by doing so, minimize the risk of inadvertent (or malicious) access and disclosure.
At his core, Yatharth is a builder driven to deliver compelling enterprise products. Before launching Codified, he worked with customers on their data platform strategies while running product management at SingleStore (a leading enterprise database company) and building data services at Microsoft (including leading the team for the initial release of Azure Databricks). Yatharth is a relentless driver who is excellent at working with customers and understanding their needs. His interaction with customers often found them frustrated at the state of data access governance in their companies. Unfortunately, most seem to be living simultaneously in two unhappy extremes: it is too difficult to access data when needed, and data is exposed too widely. And while specific solutions are available today, they often require significant human effort to configure and maintain.
Codified believes customers can have it both ways – that data access can be provided just-in-time to only those who need it while ensuring compliance with their desired data access policies. The Codified platform has four key capabilities:
- Data access is governed by policies written in natural language. A key GenAI-powered capability, it is much easier to “know” you are compliant when the policy is clear and easy to understand.
- Data access workflows are easy to define and use. Administrators can define fully automatic, policy-driven workflows and optionally include manual approvals – most compliant data access requests will flow through the system without any user intervention.
- Data is automatically classified. The first challenge customers face in data access governance is understanding all of their data. Codified leverages a combination of traditional ML models and GenAI to automatically classify all of your data.
- Codified gives you complete visibility, providing a simple-to-use experience that allows you to ask any questions about who accessed what data and why.
Every investor looks for the “why now?” — especially when investing in solutions to persistent problems. Keeping aside the growth in the use of data in all enterprises, Generative AI technologies are core to solving issues that have hindered the adoption of prior data governance solutions — enhancing security, compliance, automation, and ease of use. It is clear that the time is now for a Gen-native data governance platform to really change the game for customers.
The Codified team is working with initial customers and will be launching their product in 2024. We are excited to partner with Yatharth and the Codified team on their mission to enable seamless and secure access to data!
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