Privacy Analytics, leading experts in protecting the privacy of personal data used for analysis and research, announced it closed a venture capital investment from the BDC IT Venture Fund and the Capital Angel Network. The funds will be used to ramp up sales and marketing efforts in a rapidly growing market. According to industry analyst group Forrester Research, the database security market is expected to grow to $1.2 billion in 2014.

THE BIG DATA DILEMMA: PRIVACY AND SECONDARY USES

Commercial organizations, academia, and government are now encountering significant privacy concerns managing the large amounts of personal data being held in their databases. Increasingly, companies in the healthcare, consumer and the financial services industries, as well as government departments, are concerned about the risk of personal information being inadvertently disclosed. In addition to reputational damage, the average cost of a data breach incident (such as costs of notification, loss in share price, litigation, redress and compensation) is $5.5 million, according to a 2011 study by the Ponemon Institute.

"We are in a unique position to give our clients the ability to cost-effectively execute big data analytics on their databases, share that data with the confidence that personal privacy is respected, and still provide the highest quality data needed by complex business intelligence tools," says Dr. Khaled El Emam, founder and CEO of Privacy Analytics. "In effect, we have democratized valuable customer or patient data for many other uses."

RESEARCH AND COMMERCIAL CUSTOMERS EMBRACE RE-USABLE DATA

The company's growing customer base includes research organizations like the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences CD-Link Program (modeled after the large oncology data Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program in the United States); the Better Outcomes Registry and Network of Ontario, which is one of the largest birth registries in the world; and Heritage Provider Network for which Privacy Analytics de-identified the data being used in their Heritage Health Prize Competition. Other commercial clients include some of the largest companies in the pharmaceutical and medical devices industry, health IT vendors and the insurance industry.

"In today's world of increasing available personal data, businesses cannot afford to ignore protecting the valuable, sensitive data they have been entrusted with," says Ron Warburton, managing partner at the BDC IT Venture Fund. "De-identifying data is not as trivial as it sounds - you can pretty much identify a large percentage of the US population with just a zip code and birth date. Maintaining the privacy of personal data while providing effective market analysis and research insights uniquely positions Privacy Analytics in the database security market."

MEETING LEGAL, COMPLIANCE AND PRIVACY REGULATIONS

Privacy Analytics' solution assists companies in the healthcare market address privacy regulations around patient information and helps with the certification process for HIPAA. In the consumer Internet and financial services industry, Privacy Analytics protects against the costs associated with data breaches that include loss of customers, increased customer acquisition activities, reputation losses, as well as diminished goodwill.

ABOUT PRIVACY ANALYTICS
Privacy Analytics helps companies in the health, consumer Internet, and financial industries protect the privacy of personal data used for analysis and research. Our solutions allow secondary users of personal information to have high quality, de-identified data suitable for the most complex analytics while still meeting the most stringent legal, privacy and compliance regulations. Privacy Analytics works with some of the largest research organizations, pharmaceutical, healthcare and insurance providers in North America and our software has been used to de-identify more than 100 million records. For more information: http://www.privacyanalytics.ca

ABOUT THE BDC IT VENTURE FUND
The BDC IT Venture Fund is a Canadian venture capital fund with partners in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Ottawa. We actively invest in early stage IT companies with passionate entrepreneurs who think big and will disrupt existing industries or create entirely new markets. Entrepreneurs come first and we use our broad network and operational backgrounds to help companies grow into global leaders. We lead the majority of our investments, which are typically early stage start-ups (late seed and series A) focused on Enterprise, Internet, or Mobile. The fund has invested in many successful companies including Radian6 (acquired by Salesforce), Blaze Software (acquired by Akamai), Opalis (acquired by Microsoft), Bycast (acquired by NetApp), and Q1 Labs (acquired by IBM). Visit our website at http://www.bdc.ca/EN/solutions/venture_capital/our_team/direct_investment/Pages/information_tech.aspx.