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>> Man: We're good.
>> Hey everyone.
Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS Summit NYC.
We're in New York City, been here all day.
Lisa Martin, John Furrier, talking with AWS partners
ecosystem folks, customers, AWS folks, you name it.
Next up, one of our alumni, rejoins us.
Please welcome Anshu Sharma the co-founder
and CEO of Skyflow.
Anshu great to have you back on theCube.
>> Likewise, I'm excited to be back.
>> So I love how you guys founded this company.
Your inspiration was the zero trust data privacy vault
pioneered by two of our favorites, Apple and Netflix.
You started with a simple question.
What if privacy had an API?
So you built a data privacy vault delivered as an API.
Talk to us,
and it's only in the last three and a half years.
Talk to us about a data privacy vault
and what's so unique about it.
>> Sure. I think if you think about
all the key challenges we are seeing
in our personal lives
when we are dealing with technology companies
a lot of anxiety is around what happens to my data, right?
If you want to go to a pharmacy
they want to know not just your health ID number
but they want to know your social security number
your credit card number, your phone number
and all of that information is actually useful
because they need to be able to engage with you.
And it's true for hospitals, health systems.
It's true for your bank.
It's true for pretty much anybody you do business with
even an event like this.
But then question that keeps coming up is
where does this data go?
And how is it protected?
And the state of the art here has always been
to keep kind of, keep it protected when it's in storage
but almost all the breaches,
all the hacks happen
not because you've steal somebody's disc,
but because someone enters through an API or a portal.
So the question we asked was
we've been building different shapes of containers
for different types of data.
You don't store your logs in a data warehouse.
You don't store your analytical data in a regular RDBMS.
Similarly, you don't store your passwords and usernames
you store them in identity systems.
So if PI is so special
why isn't it a container that's used for storing PII?
So that's how the idea of Pii.World came up.
>> So you guys just got a recent funding,
a series B financing
which means for the folks out there
that don't know the inside baseball, must people do,
means you're doing well.
It's hard to get that round of funding
means you're up and growing to the right.
What's the differentiator?
Why are you guys so successful?
Why the investment growth, what's the momentum driver?
>> So I think in some ways
we took one of the most complex problems, data privacy,
like half the people can't even describe like,
does data privacy mean like I have to be GDPR compliant
or does it actually mean I'm protecting the data?
So you have multiple stakeholders in any company.
If you're a pharma company,
you may have a chief privacy officer,
a data officer, this officer, that officer,
and all of these people were talking
and the answer was buy more tools.
So if you look around behind our back,
there's probably dozens of companies out there.
One protecting data in an API call
another protecting data in a database,
another one data warehouse.
But as a CEO, CTO,
I want to know what happens to my social security number
from a customer end to end.
So we said, if you can radically simplify the whole thing
and the key insight was you can simplify it
by actually isolating and protecting this data.
And this architecture evolved on its own
at companies like Apple and other places,
but it takes dozens of engineers
for those companies to build it out.
So we like, well, the pattern will makes sense.
It logically kind is just common sense.
So instead of selling dozens of tools,
we can just give you a very simple product,
which is like one API call,
you know, protect this data...
>> So like Stripe is for a plugin for a financial transaction
you plug it into the app,
similar dynamic here, right?
>> Exactly. So it's Stripe for payments,
Twilio for Telephony.
We have API for everything,
but if you have social security numbers or pan numbers
you still are like relying on DIY.
So I think what differentiated us
and attracted the investors was,
if this works,
>> It's huge. every company needs it.
>> Well, that's the integration has become the key thing.
I got to ask you because you mentioned GDPR
and all the complexities around the laws
and the different regulations.
That could be a real blocker
in a wet blanket for innovation.
>> Anshu: Yes.
>> And with the market we're seeing here at,
at your Summit New York, small event.
10,000 people, more people here
than were at Snowflake Summit as an example.
And they're the hottest company in data.
So this small little New York event
is proven that that world is growing.
So why should this wet blanket,
these rules slow it down?
How do you balance it?
'Cause that's a concern.
If you checking all the boxes
you're never actually building anything.
>> So, you know, we just ran into a couple of customers
who still are struggling
with moving from the data center to AWS Cloud.
Now the fact that here means they want to
but something is holding them back.
I also met the AI team of Amazon.
They're doing some amazing work
and they're like, the biggest hindrance for them
is making customers feel safe
when they do the machine learning.
Because now you're opening up the data sets to more people.
And in all of those cases
your innovation basically stops
because CSO is like,
look you can't put PII in the cloud unprotected.
And with the vault architecture
we call it privacy by architecture.
So there's a term called privacy by design.
I'm like what the, is privacy by design, right?
>> John: It's an architecture.
(John laughing)
>> But if you are an architecture and a developer like me
I was like, I know what architecture is.
I don't know what privacy by design is.
>> So you guys are basically have that architecture by design
which means foundational based services.
So you're providing that as a service.
So other people don't have to build the complex.
>> Anshu: Exactly.
>> You know that you will be Apple's backend team
to build that privacy with you
you get all that benefit.
>> Exactly. And traditionally,
people have had to make compromises.
If you encrypt the data and secure it,
then you can't use it.
Using a proprietary polymorphic encryption technology
you can actually have your cake and eat it to.
So what that means for customers is,
if you want to protect data in Snowflake or REDshare,
use Skyflow with it.
We have integrations to databases, to data lakes,
all the common workflow tools.
>> Can you give us a customer example
that you think really articulates
the value of what Skyflow is delivering?
>> Well, I'll give you two examples.
One in the FinTech space, one in the health space.
So in the FinTech space
this is a company called Nomi Health.
They're a large payments processor
for the health insurance market.
And funnily enough,
their CTO actually came from Goldman Sachs.
He actually built apple card.
(John laughing)
Right?
That if we all have in our phones.
And he saw our product and he's like,
for my new company, I'm going to just use you guys
because I don't want to go hire 20 engineers.
So for them, we had a HIPAA compliant environment
a PCI compliant environment,
SOC 2 compliant environment.
And he can sleep better at night
because he doesn't have to worry
what is my engineer in Poland or Ukraine doing right now?
I have a vault.
I have rules set up.
I can audit it.
Everything is logged.
Similarly for Science 37,
they run clinical trials globally.
They wanted to solve data residency.
So for them the problem was,
how do I run one common global instance?
When the rules say you have to break everything up
and that's very expensive.
>> And so I love this.
I'm a customer. For them a customer. I love it.
You had me at hello, API integration.
I love it.
How much does it cost?
What's it going to cost me?
How do I need to think about my operationalizing?
'Cause I know with an API, I can do that.
Am I paying by the usage, by the drink?
How do I figure out?
>> So we have programs for startups
where it's really really inexpensive.
We get them credits.
And then for enterprises,
we basically have a platform fee.
And then based on the amount of data PII, we charge them.
We don't nickel and dime the customers.
We don't like the usage based model because,
you don't know how many times you're going to hit an API.
So we usually just based
on the number of customer records that you have
and you can hit them as many time as you want.
There's no API limits.
>> So unlimited record based.
>> Exactly. that's your variable.
>> Exactly. We think about you buying odd zero,
for example, for authentication
you pay them by the number of active users you have.
So something similar.
>> So you run on AWS,
but you just announced a couple of new GTM partners,
MuleSoft and plan.
Can you talk to us about, start with MuleSoft?
What are you doing and why?
And the same with VLA?
>> Sure. I mean, MuleSoft was very interesting customers
who were adopting our products at, you know,
we are buying this product
for our new applications
but what about our legacy code?
We can't go in there and add APIs there.
So the simplest way to do integration in the legacy world
is to use an integration broker.
So that's where MuleSoft integration came out
and we announced that.
It's a logical place for you to swap out
real social security numbers with, you know, fake ones.
And then we also announced a partnership with SnowFlake,
same thing.
I think every workload
as it's moving to the cloud
needs some kind of data protection with it.
So I think going forward
we are going to be announcing even more partnerships.
So you can imagine all the places you're storing PII today
whether it's in a call center solution
or analytics solution,
there's a PII story there.
>> Talk about the integration aspect
because I love the momentum.
I get everything makes secure the customers
all these environments,
integrations are super important to plug into.
And then how do I essentially operate you on my side?
Do I import the records?
How do you connect to my environment in my databases?
>> So it's really, really easy
when you encrypt the data and use Skyflow wall,
we create what is called a format preserving token,
which is essentially replacing a social security number
with something that looks like an SSN but it's not.
So that there's no schema changes involved.
You just have to do that one time swap over
and then in terms of integrations,
most of these integrations are prebuilt.
So Snowflake integration is prebuilt.
MuleSoft integration is prebuilt.
We're going to announce some new ones.
So the goal is for off the table
in platforms like Snowflake and MuleSoft,
we prebuilt all the integrations.
You can build your own.
It takes about like a day.
And then in terms of data import
basically it's the same standard process that you would use
with any other data store.
>> Got to ask you about data breaches.
Obviously the numbers in 2021 were huge.
We're seeing so much change in the cyber security landscape
ransomware becoming a household word,
a matter of when but not if...
How does Skyflow help organizations
protect themselves or reduce the number of breaches
so that they are not the next headline?
>> You know, the funny thing about breaches
is again and again,
we see people doing the same mistakes, right?
So Equifax had a breach four years ago
where a customer portal,
you know, no customer support rep
should have access to a 100 million people's data.
Like is that customer agent
really accessing 100 million?
But because we've been using legacy security tools
they either give you access
or don't give you access.
And that's not how it's going to work.
Because if I'm going to engage with the pharmacy and airline
they need to be able to use my data
in multiple different places.
So you need to have fine grain controls around it.
So I think the reason we keep getting breaches
is cybersecurity industry is selling,
10s of billions of dollars worth of tools
in the name of security
but they cannot be applied
at a fine grain level enough.
I can't say things like for my call center agent
that's living in Phoenix, Arizona
they can only verify last four digits,
but the same call center worker in Philippines
can't even see that.
So how do you get all that granular control in place?
Is really why we keep seeing data breaches.
So the Equifax breach, the Shopify breach
the Twitter breaches, they're all the same.
Like again and again,
it's either an inside person
or an external person who's gotten in.
And once you're in
and this is the whole idea of zero trust as you know.
Once you're in, you can access all the data.
Zero trust means that you don't assume that
you actually isolate PII separately.
>> A lot of the cybersecurity issues
as you were talking about, are people based.
Somebody clicking on something or gaining access.
And I always talk to security experts
about how do you control for the people aspect
besides training, awareness, education.
Is Skyflow a facilitator of that
in a way that we haven't seen before?
>> Yeah. So I think what ends up happening is,
people even after they have breaches,
they will lock down the system that had the breach,
but then they have the same data sitting
in a partner database, maybe a customer database
maybe a billing system.
So by centralizing and isolating PII in one system
you can then post roles based access control rules.
You can put limitations around it.
But if you try to do that across hundreds of DS bases,
you're just not going to be able to do it
because it's basically just literally impossible, so...
>> My final question for you is on,
for me is you're here at AWS Summits,
10,000 people like I said.
More people here than some big events
and we're just in New York city.
Okay. You actually work with AWS.
What's next for you guys
as you got the fresh funding,
you guys looking for more talent,
what's your next mountain you're going to climb?
Tell us what's next for the company.
Share your vision, put a plug in for the company.
>> Well, it's actually very simple.
Today we actually announced
that we have a new chief revenue officer who's joining us.
Tammy, she's joined us from LaunchDarkly
which is it grew from like,
you know, single digits to like over nine digits in revenue.
And the reason she's joining Skyflow
is because she sees the same inflection point hitting us.
And for us that means more marketing,
more sales, more growth in more geographies
and more partnerships.
And we think there's never been a better time
to solve privacy.
Literally everything that we deal with
even things like rove evade issues
eventually ties back into a issue around privacy.
>> Lisa: Yes.
>> AWS gets the model API, you know, come on, right?
That's their model.
>> Exactly. So I think if you look
at the largest best companies
that have been built in the last 20 years
they took something that should have been simple
but was not.
There used to be Avayas of the world,
selling Telephony intel,
Twilio came and said, look an API.
And we are trying to do the same
to the entire security compliance and privacy industry
is to narrow the problem down and solve it once.
>> (indistinct) have it.
We're going to get theCube API.
(Lisa laughing)
That's what we're going to do.
All right.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Awesome. Anshu, thank you for joining us,
talking to us about what's new at Skyflow.
It sounds like you got that big funding investment.
Probably lots of strategic innovation about to happen.
So you'll have to come back in a few months
and maybe at next reinvent in six months
and tell us what's new, what's going on.
>> Last theCube interview was very well received.
People really like the kind of questions you guys asked.
So I love this show and I think...
>> It's great when you're a star like you,
you got good market, great team, smart.
I mean, look at this.
I mean, what slow down are we talking about here?
>> Yeah. I don't see...
>> There is no slow down on the enterprise.
>> Privacy's hot and it's incredibly important
and we're only going to be seeing more and more of it.
>> You can talk to any CIO, CSO, CTO or the board
and they will tell you
there is no limit to the budget they have
for solving the core privacy issues.
We love that.
>> John: So you want to move on to building?
>> Lisa: Obviously that must make you smile.
>> John: You solved a big problem.
>> Thank you.
>> Awesome. Anshu, thank you again.
Congrats on the momentum
and we'll see you next time
and hear more on the evolution of Skyflow.
Thank you for your time. >> Thank you.
>> For John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCube live from New York City
at AWS Summit NYC 22.
We'll be right back with our next guest.
So stick around.
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