Hazy raises $3.5m Seed+
Funding the next stage of Hazy’s growth
Today, I am thrilled to announce that we’ve secured an additional \$3.5M in follow on seed funding led by Notion with further support from our fantastic group of existing investors, including M12, Albion, Nationwide and Pentland.
Over the next 12 months, we’ll be using this capital to grow the team, expand our capabilities and work with more customers in the financial sector and other regulated industries.
It’s now three years since we founded the company at University College London - and what a ride it has been.
Having won the $1 million Microsoft Innovate.AI prize for the best AI startup in Europe, Hazy was able to secure a further $1.8m funding in early 2018 from an amazing group of investors. These included the UCL Technology Fund, Notion, M12, Pentland, Nationwide Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners and AI Seed.
Numerous data breaches have created a backdrop of increased consumer and corporate sensitivity. It is in this context that we set out to build an anonymisation platform that helps companies speed up their innovation without risking their customers data.
We quickly realised that data anonymisation was not enough. Anonymisation loses too much information and lacks the safety our customers require. We decided to solve these problems by working on the next generation of privacy enhancing technology – creating a synthetic data solution.
Synthetic data is generated from scratch but is based on the statistical properties of the real data. Hazy synthetic data doesn't contain any identifiable information, surpassing the privacy guarantees provided by anonymisation while maintaining the statistical quality.
We are now working with a number of banks and financial institutions, including Nationwide to help them speed up innovation and get products and insights to market more quickly.
“We are incredibly excited to be part of this funding round in Hazy. We believe that synthetic data will open a world of opportunities for large enterprises to use their data, extract insights and train their models among others, without compromising their customers’ information.” - Itxaso Del Palacio, Notion.
“We are delighted to continue, and strengthen, our relationship with Hazy by joining this funding round. Over the last 18 months we have been working closely with Hazy to test, experiment and learn about how we could use their innovative technology to help enhance the way we manage our data. We look forward to continuing to explore ways to help us deliver more personalised products and services that will benefit our members both now and in the future.” - Alex Bannister, Director of Strategic Partnering, Nationwide Building Society.
The team at Hazy are incredibly excited about the steps we’ve already taken to create one the world’s leading synthetic data platforms and are looking forward to accelerating through our next stage of growth.