Today, we’re excited to talk about our recent funding announcement with Habu. Data privacy laws have been in place for several years, and most companies now understand GDPR and CCPA type privacy regulations. But operating competitively within the confines of data privacy regulations hasn’t been easy or without risk.
What’s a data clean room?
Before you picture data scientists in hazmat suits, know that a data clean room is a piece of software that enables companies to match user-level data without sharing any PII/raw data with one another.
However, a big challenge is that the iterations of clean rooms to date have been confined to walled cloud environments and bulk movement of highly sensitive data. As a result, one clean room cannot be shared with another clean room, and neither can the insights.
Why Habu?
Habu’s federated data clean rooms enable the same data collaboration across cloud environments. In other words, data lakes across disparate cloud environments could be joined for querying without moving the data or providing direct access to the data.
Habu (or “hub” in Japanese) is a true innovator in this space. The company offers the only solution that has a comprehensive and intuitive data intelligence layer that empowers its customers to work efficiently across any clean room to power insights. Through privacy-safe and governance-safe data collaboration, companies can leverage Habu to drive private segmentation and activation, journey analysis, measurement, experimentation, and distributed machine learning.
And by streamlining and accelerating data collaboration between partners, Habu enables marketing and data teams to maximize the value of data-driven initiatives at an exponentially faster rate.
Founders on a mission to collaborate
We knew we wanted to work with the Habu team because they have been breathing data for years and have an incredible depth of domain knowledge. The team first met at Krux, a leader in data management platforms (DMP), and continued to work together after Salesforce acquired Krux. Many of Krux’s customers were publishers and marketers looking to maximize the billions they spent on advertising by harnessing DMP and delivering more personalized advertising and e-commerce experiences.
Habu’s founders understand data collaboration and its challenges, including siloed platforms, minimal interoperability, and confusing privacy legislation.
We’re also encouraged by Snowflake’s decision to partner with Habu on product and go to market after evaluating many different vendors in this space. We believe Habu is the best team to build a powerful solution here.
Habu’s future
In Habu’s press release, CEO Matt Kilmartin said he believes “a new era of the global data economy is emerging” and that Habu has built the critical infrastructure needed for brands to effectively leverage data collaboration.
We believe tailwinds in this space are inevitable, especially with new privacy laws and business changes (e.g., Google’s announcements on third-party cookies). This latest round of funding accelerates Habu’s growth and ability to help even more leading brands use privacy-safe data collaboration for comprehensive data and insights.
We’re excited about Habu’s next phase and welcome them to Norwest’s portfolio of data solutions.
