Jason du Preez, CEO of Privitar: A passionate leader dedicated to helping organizations get more from their data — while protecting the privacy of individuals

Privacy engineering is an emerging field of study, and its exact meaning and scope are still evolving. Privacy engineering brings tools, techniques, metrics, and taxonomy to implement 'Privacy by Design'. By building privacy protections at the core design, privacy engineering aims to reduce privacy risks and to protect privacy at scale. Privacy engineers play a very important role in Digital Transformation. They ensure that privacy considerations are integrated into product design. Privacy engineering results in better products, increases customers’ trust and thus influences a company’s bottom line.

Privitar is one such company that empowers organizations to use their data safely and ethically. Its modern data provisioning solution builds collaborative workflows and policy-based data privacy and access controls into data operations. Founded in 2014, co-founders Jason du Preez and John Taysom united to combine John’s academic work on privacy with Jason’s experience of big data and enterprise software. Together, they launched Privitar, with a passion for building a center of excellence around their idea that technology and privacy together can thrive. Fast-forward to today, Privitar is a global leader—and set the standard in privacy engineering—for organizations worldwide.

Headquartered in London, Privitar now has offices around the world, with an international customer base which includes Global 2000 banking, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, professional services, retail and telecommunications companies like HSBC, Citi, the UK’s National Health Service and AstraZeneca, to name a few. To date, Privitar has raised more than $150 million in funding, led by Warburg Pincus, Accel, Partech, IQ Capital, Salesforce Ventures, ABN AMRO Ventures and HSBC.

Helping Customers Use Data in Innovative Ways

Modern Data Provisioning Platform: The Modern Data Provisioning Platform streamlines collaborative workflows and policy-based controls to create safe and meaningful data that protects individuals. Help your teams effortlessly access data—safely, and without complex approval processes. Streamline data registration, policy management, and approval workflows to accelerate self-service data access. Make more data sources available for safe use and unlock valuable data stores that were previously unusable. Map data protections to your use cases to transform sensitive data into safe data. Safely expand data access for safe use by more users, to equip everyone with the insights they need. Effortlessly control what your users see, without disrupting their ability to get value from your data. Get more value from protected data and help your teams generate useful insights — without compromising on privacy. Using a comprehensive range of privacy-enhancing computation techniques, you can tune data resolution for each analysis.

Data Privacy Management Software: The Data Privacy Platform embeds policy-based protection into data pipelines — simultaneously streamlining privacy risk management and data resolution. Transform sensitive data into safe data to unlock previously inaccessible data stores and sources that your team can use to get the insights they need. You can access data faster, with streamlined policy management, automated controls, and rapid onboarding for new use cases — so your team can start using data immediately. Gain peace of mind with streamlined, automated controls to reduce risk and demonstrate compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

Data Privacy for Chat: Customer interactions on communication channels like social media, SMS messaging, and chatbots generate large amounts of conversational text. This unstructured data contains valuable information about product or service issues, sentiment, feedback, and more; but it may also contain personally identifiable information that is subject to regulatory control. Therefore, access to this conversational text for analysis is often limited or completely restricted in its raw form. The NLP model classifies free-form text, character by character. The Privitar transformation engine uses the classifications to apply a privacy policy. A policy consists of rules determining how to transform the text, allowing for consistent tokenization of protected information. Privitar trains the NLP model using a proprietary active learning process that enables higher accuracy than competing offerings from cloud vendors. You can tailor the model to your organization’s data.

Data Compliance Navigator: Grasp the impact of data compliance laws, principles, and practices on data use across multiple jurisdictions. Get the steps you need to take to comply—immediately, not in months. Data Compliance Navigator shows analysts and data scientists how factors like purpose and location impact the compliance risk related to their projects. Compliance steps are transparent and digestible. Data Compliance Navigator provides business users with an understanding of risks and data compliance steps related to the data assets they want to share. Data Compliance Navigator gives compliance teams actionable compliance steps to inform the access and privacy policies they put in place before granting access to data.

About the Leader

Jason du Preez is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Privitar. As the CEO he is responsible for Privitar’s vision, strategy, culture, and funding. He is passionate about the benefits of data to society and Privitar’s vision of building a center of excellence around privacy engineering products. He is a serial entrepreneur who brings proven start-up and enterprise software experience to the business. Prior to founding Privitar he held global leadership roles across technology and data management at Thomson Reuters. Before that he co-founded and led the growth of data management software company, m35, up to a successful exit through sale to Thomson.

Jason has a Bachelor of Business Science degree from the University of Cape Town.

"Only Privitar has the right combination of technology, regulatory expertise, and best practices to support modern data innovation initiatives while navigating regulations and protecting customer trust."