Riddhiman Das was working for Alibaba searching for privacy technology companies to invest in to solve Alibaba’s data privacy challenges. He never found the right one, so he decided to build it himself. That company is TripleBlind.
Das, co-founder and CEO who along with co-founder Greg Storm founded the Kansas City, Missouri-based TripleBlind in 2019, believes his company’s software created the most complete and scalable solution for privacy enhancing computation. This founder’s journey story is based on my interview with Das. TripleBlind’s patented breakthroughs in advanced mathematics, cryptography and AI arm organizations with the ability to share, leverage and monetize regulated data.
Riddhiman Das Creates TripleBlindTo Solve Data Privacy Challenge
“I started looking at companies to invest in that would solve data privacy issues at Alibaba scale, meaning billions of users and trillions of dollars scale. And what I found was that the approaches people were taking were very ideologically sound, but not pragmatically solving a business problem,” says Das. He saw companies that took a very particular technique to deliver privacy for a particular purpose. Each company was betting on the future of a particular kind of encryption, such as homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves, secure chips embedded in hardware or synthetic data.
“That’s when I realised that none of the companies that existed in 2019 was able to solve Alibaba’s business problems and the broader problems in society at scale, is what led me to found TripleBlind, because we never made an investment in a privacy company, so I decided to build it. And I've got a lot of background in this space,” says Das.
Prior to Alibaba, Das was the product architect for EyeVerify, a software-only biometric solution that that allowed for password-free access to mobile devices by taking a selfie that looked at the veins in the white part of your eye, entirely in software, kept it secure, and allowed for matches to have meaning, even if the phone was completely compromised and completely destroyed. That company was acquired by Ant Financial, the subsidiary of Alibaba in 2016. Das was then brought on to run the company’s venture efforts outside of China.
“So, I had a lot of background in thinking about privacy, but from a very narrow scope. I was thinking about it from a biometric scope. And so, when I realised that there was a broader problem to be solved, and that the existing approaches were not solving the business problems that led to a gap in the market. So, I spent a lot of time and we invented something called ‘one way encryption’,” says Das.
According to Das, this one-way encryption innovation improves the practical use of privacy preserving technology, by adding true scalability and faster processing, with support for all data and algorithm types. TripleBlind natively supports major cloud platforms, including availability for download and purchase via cloud marketplaces. TripleBlind unlocks the intellectual property value of data, while preserving privacy and ensuring compliance with HIPAA and GDPR.
“What TripleBlind does at the technical level is effectively bring one way encryption to market where the data cannot ever be decrypted and can only be used for the authorised purpose it was explicitly mathematically granted permission for. The data is blind to everybody else except the person that needs to know,” says Das. Hence the name TripleBlind.
Das sees TripleBlind as the infrastructure for data democratisation and monetization, enabling institutions like financial institutions, pharmaceuticals and healthcare organisations to create hubs of data that allow the spokes to connect to them from anywhere in the world without fear of data breaches or falling afoul of regional data privacy laws.
“The way we work with healthcare data, HIPAA, a well-intentioned piece of regulation, has largely slowed down innovation in healthcare. And what TripleBlind has the opportunity to do is really advance a rapid pace of innovation without sacrificing patient privacy, or researchers’ intellectual property,” says Das.
TripleBlind is now a 35-person company growing fast, working with partners like Accenture and the Mayo Clinic, who are also investors. According to Das, its technology has been validated at length by federal institutions, including the government cybersecurity agency.
As a result the company has attracted $32 million in financing to date. Its latest Series A round in October of 2021 for $24 million was led by General Catalyst and the Mayo Clinic. Additional investors include Dolby Family Venture, Accenture, Wavemaker 360, KCRise Fund, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Flyover Capital, NextGen Venture Partners and many others.
Das grew up in what he describes as the volatile part of eastern India that's disputed between India and China. His dad died when he not even a teen yet and was raised by a single mother. “I always thought that I wanted to come to the United States to pursue my dreams. I was very fortunate in that I got my first computer, which was a Windows 95 computer when I was six years old. And so that started a love for programming that, of course, continues to this day,” says Das.
He fulfilled his American dream when he found his way to Kansas City in the U.S. when he was given a scholarship to the University of Missouri, even though he had to use his grandfather’s map to find it. “I'm a little bit of an accidental entrepreneur. I always wanted to work at the edge of what's possible in technology. I always thought that I would work in the creation of new software technologies that create something that the world didn't have before. I am fortunate to have spent my entire career dedicated to that,” says Das.
As for the future? Das believes that with TripleBlind as the foundational privacy infrastucture layer, “Over the next five years, what excites me is that privacy, in the sense of consumer privacy, in the sense of regulatory privacy, in the sense of privacy enabling innovation is becoming real, as opposed to privacy limiting innovation or being an afterthought,” concludes Das.
