Duality Technologies Raises $30M Led by LG Technology Ventures

Duality Technologies, a leading provider of privacy-enhanced data collaboration solutions, today announced that it has raised a $30M Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $49 million. The round was led by LG Technology Ventures with participation from Euclidean Capital and the National Bank of Canada’s corporate venture capital arm NAventures, along with existing investors Intel Capital, Hearst Ventures and Team8. Duality will use the funds to expand its go-to-market operations, advance its partnerships with leading technology vendors, and further cement its product and technology leadership in the fields of privacy-preserving machine learning and Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs).

Founded by world-renowned cryptographers and data scientists, Duality has harnessed its foremost expertise in Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and data science to develop the Duality SecurePlus® suite of secure data collaboration applications, addressing the specific business needs of organizations which seek to collaborate with their ecosystem on sensitive data while protecting their business interests and complying with data privacy regulations. Duality SecurePlus® applications enable organizations to collaborate on protected data and AI models, by keeping them encrypted during computation. The collaborating parties can securely run computations in any environment – whether their own, their partners’, or on a third-party cloud –  without exposing sensitive data, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

By facilitating collaborative analysis of decentralized sensitive data, Duality enables enterprises to overcome challenges posed by growing data localization and privacy regulations and join forces across jurisdictions to leverage sensitive internal data for collaboration in business, science and security in today’s increasingly data-driven global economy.

A recent Gartner report identified privacy-enhancing computation as one of 2021’s top strategic technology trends, predicting that by 2025, half of large organizations will adopt privacy-enhancing computation as a means of processing data. Duality offers privacy-enhanced applications for a variety of use cases across regulated industries, such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Government and more. An example of such privacy-enhanced services is Duality’s recent partnership with Oracle FCCM (Financial Crime and Compliance Management), jointly offering privacy-protected AML (anti-money-laundering) information sharing across financial institutions.

“The amount of data businesses possess has been multiplying exponentially, yet the breadth and depth of insights they can extract from it have not expanded at the same rate, mainly due to data silos caused by growing data privacy regulations and business barriers,” said Dr. Alon Kaufman, CEO and Co-Founder, Duality Technologies. “Duality’s collaborative, secure computing solutions offer a way out of this impasse by making data usable while keeping it protected. Companies and organizations recognize that embracing privacy-preserving technology is becoming a core business need, giving them a competitive edge while protecting their sensitive data assets. We are excited by this round of financing led by LG Technology Ventures and are empowered by our new and existing investors’ shared vision of the transformational impact of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies on the future of data collaboration and AI.”

The company’s leadership in PETs has been recently recognized by a $14.5M DARPA contract to develop an advanced privacy-preserving hardware accelerator to enable privacy preserving machine learning applications. Duality is also collaborating with Intel to optimize HE-based privacy-enhanced data science and AI applications. In June, the company was named a 2021 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer for its cutting-edge solutions for privacy protection in the digital economy.

“As privacy challenges mount in our data-driven world, Duality has established itself as a market leader in the swiftly developing privacy tech space,” said Taejoon Park, Managing Director, LG Technology Ventures. “Demand for collaborative and secure computing techniques is skyrocketing – including privacy-preserving AI and Machine Learning analytics – and will continue to do so as businesses look to unlock their treasure chests of data while staying on the right side of increasingly complex privacy regulations. Duality is ideally positioned to lead the applications of privacy-enhanced computing in numerous industries through this period of rapid change, and I am excited to see the company expand its highly innovative solutions to even more fields.”

“We believe that the groundbreaking technology productized by Duality, which enables organizations across all industries to collaborate on their sensitive data, will transform how business and research ecosystems share data and insights in the era of machine learning and AI,” said Ashvin Chhabra, President & Chief Investment Officer, Euclidean Capital.

“Duality has the potential to redefine the category of privacy-protected data collaboration, bringing to market a suite of privacy-enhanced applications that can help companies meet today’s core business demands: the growing need for collaboration across teams, organizations and borders,” said Roi Bar-Kat, Head of Intel Capital Israel. “We are excited to support the company’s future endeavors as data privacy continues its march towards the center stage of business leaders’ attention.”

Founded in 2016, Duality’s founding team includes Turing Award winner Prof. Shafi GoldwasserMIT’s Prof. Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the co-inventor of the foundational BGV Homomorphic Encryption scheme, and Dr. Kurt Rohloff, founder of the PALISADE Homomorphic Encryption open-source library on which Duality’s platform is based, as well as CEO Dr. Alon Kaufman and Chairwoman Rina Shainski.

About Duality Technologies

Duality Technologies is at the forefront of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), setting a new standard for privacy-preserving data collaboration. Duality SecurePlus®, a leading PET platform, combines advanced Homomorphic Encryption and data science, enabling organizations to collaborate on data and derive insights without exposing their sensitive data. Duality’s products are used by companies across regulated industries including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications and more. Duality was recently selected by the World Economic Forum as 2021 Tech Pioneer. For more information, please visit dualitytech.com.

About LG Technology Ventures

LG Technology Ventures was established in 2018 and is the venture capital investment arm of the LG Group of South Korea. The LG Technology Ventures team consists of experienced investors, entrepreneurs, technologists, and industry domain experts. Currently, LG Technology Ventures is managing over $400 million of fund assets and invests in early-stage information technology, automotive, manufacturing, life-sciences, energy, and advanced materials companies. The company strives to create value to its portfolio companies by helping them develop strategic partnerships with various LG Companies. For more information, please visit lgtechventures.com.