Security experts launch Boston startup to help with data privacy complexity

Amid an impending flurry of data-privacy regulations in the United States, a Boston startup launched this week is trying to help midsize companies comply — quickly. 

Cytrio Inc. was created in anticipation of a future need by companies that collect customer data and will need to be in compliance with regulations similar to the EU’s GDPR that are coming down the pike. 

Companies collecting data from California residents, for example, will be subject to the state’s new data-privacy laws starting in 2023. There are similar regulations in the works in dozens of other states, and Congress has toyed with different versions of a federal data-privacy law for years. 

One of the basic tenets of most of those proposed and existing laws is that customers have a right to access all of the personal information about them collected by a company. The market niche Cytrio is aiming to fill is automating that process, so companies don’t have to pull the data manually when a user asks for it, which can be a time-consuming and costly effort. 

“In a typical company, security teams are already up to their eyeballs busy with addressing cybersecurity challenges,” said Vijay Basani, the company’s CEO and founder. “What we’ve heard from them is that they want something that is automated, easy to deploy, and doesn’t require a dedicated team to operate and manage.” 

The company is developing both a portal for customers to use and a back-end automation process that will identify and collate the personal information of anyone requesting their data, a process Basani said will take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours depending on the complexity of the request.

Along with Cytrio’s launch Tuesday, it announced that it had raised $3.5 million in seed funding from angel investors and institutional seed investors, including Dreamit Ventures, Food Retail Ventures and Rockwood Group. 

Basani is a serial entrepreneur who has had companies acquired by HP and NetApp. The company’s chief product officer, Pankaj Parekh, is a security expert and former Microsoft and zScaler executive. And chief technology officer Darshan Joshi spent 14 years at cybersecurity giant Symantec, including as vice president of engineering. 

Basani is in Boston, while his other two co-founders are California-based. 

“We have tremendous security-focused talent in Boston,” he said. The company has more than 20 employees now and is looking to expand to 40 in the next year. Cytrio's product will start at $499 a month, according to the company's website, with more expensive plans and custom enterprise solutions for bigger customers.

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