The process of exchanging sensitive health data is complex and time-consuming, as healthcare entities are required to comply with stringent privacy standards when sharing and analyzing this information. On Tuesday, a startup focused on speeding up this process while still maintaining robust privacy protections raked in $6.9 million in seed funding.
The San Francisco-based company, named Integral, was founded last year. Its seed round was led by Haystack, The General Partnership and Virtue Ventures. The round also had participation from Also Capital, Array Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, LiveRamp Ventures and Venrex.
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“It’s hard to share and analyze sensitive healthcare data to create actionable outcomes because data compliance processes take weeks to months. By enabling those processes to occur in hours to days, we remove the friction to share and analyze the data that is necessary for high quality, fast drug development, as well as drug distribution and a variety of other use cases,” said Integral CEO Shubh Sinha.
The startup’s technology seeks to make dataset creation easier for pharmaceutical companies, payers and healthcare providers by automating the process for data de-identification and compliance certification.
By combining healthcare data like medical records and genetic information with non-healthcare data such as social media activity, purchasing history and location data, these entities can create datasets that give them a well-rounded understanding of a person’s health and lifestyle, Sinha explained. Without Integral’s technology, healthcare organizations have to depend on humans to conduct data certifications in order to create these datasets — this labor-intensive process often spans multiple months and misses out on valuable data, he said.
Integral’s technology continuously reads data and programmatically runs privacy analyses, Sinha declared. He also pointed out that the startup’s platform allows users such as data scientists to remediate datasets via its easy-to-use user interface.
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“Integral enables bespoke, quick and custom dataset creation to maximize analytic and compliance value,” Sinha said. “Customers will no longer have to wait weeks to months for datasets that will inform critical business decisions. Instead, they are able to reach commercial decisions quicker, measure return on investment and iterate.”
The first and only company Integral has named as a customer is Skyflow, a privacy API for sensitive data.
Integral is not the only company selling data privacy solutions to the healthcare sector — so are companies like Osano, Segment and Ethyca. Sinha argued that his company stands out because it has “an end-to-end suite to enable dataset creation, compliance documentation management and a variety of other data needs.”
In his view, Integral’s competitors “lack a cohesive, multifaceted suite.”
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