Informatica bets big on data privacy with Privitar acquisition

Informatica, a provider of end-to-end data management solutions for enterprises, today announced the intent to acquire Privitar, a London-based startup helping companies embed privacy protection into their data efforts. The financial terms of the transaction, which is expected to close by the third quarter of 2023, were not disclosed.

The deal will strengthen the privacy layer of Informatica’s tech stack, particularly the company’s AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform, enabling enterprises to democratize the use of data across departments while adhering to regulations and ethical data principles at the same time.

“Data governance and responsible use of data is a growing priority for large businesses, but too often requires trading off agility and self-service. With Privitar’s data access management and privacy capabilities integrated into IDMC, customers can deliver best-in-class data governance, access, policies, and compliance empowering better data-driven decision-making and business outcomes,” Amit Walia, CEO at Informatica, said in a statement.

What capabilities does Privitar bring to the table?

Founded in 2014 and last valued at $400 million, Privitar has been all about helping companies protect data while enabling its use for use cases like AI and analytics. The company offers tools to build collaborative workflows and policy-based data privacy and access controls into data operations. For instance, it can be used to embed invisible watermarks to track unauthorized distribution of data or automatically de-identify the information, taking into account who’s accessing it.

With this deal, all these capabilities from Privitar will be coming into Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud to support critical, high-growth use cases around cloud analytics, governance, data mesh, and data marketplace. The platform will combine the tooling with its Claire AI engine to automate the application of policy-based privacy and access controls for end customers.

“Joining Informatica will enable us to better serve our customers with an integrated data management stack delivering a complete data governance solution with security and privacy intrinsic to the platform. As part of Informatica, we can accelerate our innovation, enhance our capabilities, and expand our reach,” Jason du Preez, CEO at Privitar, said.

Notably, this will be another major update for IDMC, following the introduction of Claire GPT to help enterprise users consume, process, manage and analyze data through plain natural language prompts.

Growing consolidation in the data space

The deal is another example of growing consolidation in the data space. Similar signs were seen when engineering house dbt Labs’ agreed to acquire Transform, which has sought to create a semantic data layer to better integrate the modern data stack, and Thoma Bravo-owned Qlik announced its intent to join efforts with Talend, another Thoma Bravo-owned entity.

“It makes a ton of sense for the Snowflakes and the Databricks of the world to be very acquisitive. Whether we see really big acquisitions right now or whether they come towards the latter half of this year or the next year is a point of question. I’d probably bet more on the latter half of this year and early part of next year,” Sean Knapp, founder and CEO of Ascend.io, which automates data and analytics engineering workloads, told VentureBeat in February.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz