Ryan Sandler might be one of the biggest winners from the Equifax data breach fallout.
Sandler is the cofounder and CEO of Truework, a data management startup that claims to give consumers control of their data. On Tuesday, Truework announced it raised $12 million in Series A funding from a who’s who of Silicon Valley venture funds. Sequoia Capital led the round with participation from Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Founder Collective.
“Consumers want more consent over their data,” Sandler told Business Insider. “The past few months is great validation for us that consumers care more about this than ever, and we can start with that mission from the beginning instead of having to start over.”
Sandler describes Truework as a next-generation credit monitoring tool that will text or email a customer each time a bank or employer requests their data. An HR department or bank purchases a plan with Truework, which pulls data from that company’s payroll, and automates verification requests with user consent.
Currently, the tools only work for income and employment data, but Sandler said his team has plans to expand Truework into the single verifiable identity for the internet.
“At every step, we have taken enormous steps and caution to build the most secure systems,” Sandler said. “We are ensuring that consent is required and doing background checks on all the banks to ensure no bad actors can get your information.”
The two-year-old startup came of age during the height of blockchain mania, an emerging technology that many claimed would replace driver’s licenses and passwords as a person’s online identity for everything from mortgages to coffee.
“We were hacking away at blockchain ourselves and I think it helped us find the problem because it was a classic example of a centralized monopoly,” Sandler said. “The technology database that we chose was not as important as the problem itself and the ability to give users control over privacy. When we looked at the privacy regulations, building something like this on blockchain is impossible while staying in compliance.”
According to Sandler, those privacy regulations like GDPR and California’s privacy legislation are encouraging because he thinks they are reflections of consumer demand for data control.
“It’s really exciting to us to see these laws being passed that help guide employers and legacy actors to implement these models,” Sandler said.
