Israeli Data Ownership Startup Emerges From Stealth, Secures $3M

Israeli startup Mine, an AI-based platform that “helps people become owners of their personal data,” announced Wednesday emerged from stealth mode and raised $3 million seed round backed by global, tech-focused investment firm Battery Ventures and Israeli VC firm Saban Ventures. 

The company says that following the funds raised, it will launch in Europe to “trigger a data ownership and control revolution.”

The company, which launched after spending the last year operating in stealth, was co-founded by Gal Ringel, Gal Golan (current Chief Technology Officer,) and Kobi Nissan (current Chief Product Officer). Ringel and Golan have held leadership roles in the elite IDF Cyber Intelligence Unit 8200. All three founders have worked in companies such as Nielsen, Verizon, Microsoft, Accenture, and others.

The tech startup empowers the user to discover their own digital footprint, or what the internet knows about them. It also gives users a choice in where their data should or shouldn’t be. The company says its mission is to build a new global privacy standard by helping people worldwide make more informed choices on their personal data, while on the internet.

The tech behind Mine allows them to see which companies hold their data and what information is being collected about them. The startup uses non-intrusive machine learning algorithms that “unlock the power in users’ email inboxes, looking for digital traces that companies have left through previous on-going relationships with them,” the company said in a statement.

The company then gives users ownership over their own data by “leveraging global privacy regulations, specifically the GDPR’s ‘right to be forgotten’ clause’, which allows them to request online services delete their data. Mine can also send a reclaim request to each company on behalf of the user.

“We are entering a decade where people are increasingly concerned with how intrusive everyday apps and platforms have become. Therefore, we decided to invest our efforts into building a solution that will provide consumers with a real choice about who gets to keep their data and how it’s used. We are kick-starting the future of data ownership,” says Ringel.

Mine says it never reads, collects or stores any email content (or holds any individuals’ data) and is committed to using the absolute minimum information in order to provide its service.

The company has already analyzed four million digital services in order to relay to users what parts of their data are being stored and collected by different services.

“Mine is solving one of the most urgent issues in privacy: allowing individuals to exercise more control over their data. Mine’s role will have an impact on the wider digital economy, where increasingly, trust and transparency can be established between individuals and companies. Intel believes privacy is a fundamental human right and technologies like Mine play a critical role along with legislation in realizing the promise of optimizing for the ethical and innovative use of data,” said David Hoffman, global privacy officer at Intel Corporation.”