Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, Founder and CEO of Samooha throws light on the core data sensitivity issues that modern digital advertisers and marketers should keep in mind when collecting or reusing customer data:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Kamakshi, tell us about yourself and the story behind Samooha…

Each entrepreneur’s journey is unique, including mine. The beauty lies in the fact that every entrepreneur has the opportunity to create their own story, as there are no predetermined recipes or playbooks for success.

After graduating from Stanford with a Ph.D. in information theory, I was set for an academic career track in teaching and research. That’s when I had the chance to meet with a few early engineers at AdMob (today it is Google’s Mobile Advertising product). While I enjoyed the idea of thinking deeply and rooting algorithm design in mathematical formulations and guarantees, the opportunity to apply them to new emerging problems at internet scale was tantalizing. One thing led to another, and the start of my entrepreneurial journey began, leading to today, as I have started my second company, Samooha.

I saw a need in the market to treat consumer data with a higher level of sanctity. Ensuring data is secure when collaborating between partners is a challenge for businesses of all sizes, with elongated security reviews and procurement processes.

That’s why I wanted to create a “big easy button” for enterprises to do right by customer data.

Samooha launched in February 2023 with $12.5 million in funding to disrupt the consumption patterns of most sophisticated collaboration-based data applications.

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When it comes to adtech users: what data sensitivities should they be paying more attention to?

Abuse happens in tech because it’s easy to do. But, it also occurs when there are no easy solutions to do right by sensitive data. Companies begin to cut corners.

Historically, enterprises haven’t had the means to easily swap highly-sensitive data and guarantee its security, which left more opportunities for data leaks and liability issues for enterprises.

Because of this, those adtech users should be paying attention to data sensitivities such as personally identifiable information, user tracking and behavioral data, location information, cross-device tracking, ad fraud and brand safety, and third-party data sharing.

Addressing these data sensitivities is vital to maintain trust among users, advertisers, and regulators within the adtech ecosystem. Samooha solves this by making trusted, secure data collaboration a “consumer-grade service” across all data infrastructures to safely share data, collaborate and run analytics, data science, and machine learning/AI workloads.

Samooha’s approach to privacy-enhancing technologies puts the product and ease of use at the forefront while grounded in the spectrum of cloud-infrastructure-based security assurances to cryptographic guarantees.

Beyond adtech, Samooha is breaking into verticals like healthcare, life sciences and financial services, all of which have the same need for secure data collaboration technology.

Can you highlight more about Samooha’s core features and how it enables adtech users?

Samooha’s core product is a cross-cloud, secure data collaboration application. It enables businesses and enterprises to securely share, collaborate and garner insights from their and their partner ecosystem’s data irrespective of the underlying cloud/data stack any of them are on.

Think of a very intuitive collaboration product experience like Slack where you are not simply communicating with co-workers in a channel but are actually learning, sharing, and collaborating around data owned by you and your partner by running analytics workloads without moving and securing data in that channel/room.

There is no first-class product of this today that removes the friction of data collaboration and sharing and creates a high-speed lane across clouds. Samooha is building for this vision. While doing so, Samooha is also bringing verticalized industry-specific products that address use cases and applications in healthcare, financial services, advertising media, and entertainment.

Historically, the adtech industry specifically has treated user data like a commodity. With government regulations and Big Tech shifting the industry towards data practices similar to healthcare and finance, Samooha enables these users by ensuring their data is private and secure.

Most recently, Samooha launched a Free Trial feature to lower entry barriers to secure data collaboration. This approach directly drives tangible business value and outcomes across the modern data stack.

What can marketing and advertising teams do on the whole to ensure they have better ways to collate, secure, share sensitive customer and other data?

Ten years from now, the way industries handle data will look completely different.

Data is oxygen to the Age of AI, but to capture the true value of data, it must be frictionless and shareable. Unfortunately, as all data moves to the cloud, it is being re-siloed with increasingly restrictive limits on sharing due to enterprise governance and privacy policies.

To ensure better ways of collating, securing, and sharing sensitive customer and other data, marketing and advertising teams must embrace the industry-wide shift towards first-party data. This involves adopting clean rooms and data collaboration practices, which allow for frictionless and shareable data, overcoming the challenges posed by enterprise governance and privacy policies.

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If you had to share five things about the future of enterprise data security norms and how technologies enabling this will evolve: what would you say?

• Enterprise data security will be one of the foundational pillars of every modern data stack.
• Secure data collaboration will be a core functionality of every modern data cloud.
• Data security paradigm shifts by moving compute to data.
• The transformative impact of generative AI will double the pace of development of security enhancing products every year.
• Data security is a first class product feature and not an afterthought.