Cloud-based data storage company Snowflake announced Tuesday its intention to acquire secure data-sharing software provider LeapYear Technologies in an effort to increase its data cleanroom capabilities.
What is a clean data room?
Data clean rooms are software frameworks that allow different organizations to collaborate on data analysis by allowing multiple parties to analyze data sets without disclosing the raw data to each other.
“To further our mission to mobilize the world’s data, including some of the most sensitive data, Snowflake announces its intention to acquire LeapYear, a differential privacy platform, and to bring LeapYear’s equipment and technology to Snowflake to help our customers to take advantage of limited data,” Carl Perry, Snowflake’s director of product management, wrote in a blog post.
Differential privacy enables secure data sharing
Differential privacy is a term used to describe systems that allow users to share information about a data set by describing patterns within the data set, without sharing any personally identifiable or individual information.
The addition of LeapYear’s differential privacy platform to Snowflake will increase its Global Cean Room offerings, Perry wrote.
Data cleanrooms have been in demand due to data privacy regulations, such as the European Union’s GDPR, as these software frameworks allow companies to collaborate and analyze consumer data while remaining compliant with regulations. .
Another reason for the growing popularity of data cleanrooms is that they give companies the ability to analyze large volumes of aggregated data.
“Leaders in the media and advertising industries such as Disney, NBCUniversal, Acxiom, OpenAP and Roku use Snowflake Global Data Clean Rooms to open up secure and auditable collaboration opportunities across organizations,” Perry wrote. “This has also opened up new collaboration opportunities for organizations in other industries, such as retail and CPG.[productos de consumo empaquetados].[consumerpackagedgoods”[consumerpackagedgoods”
The market size for data cleanrooms stood at $4.4 billion at the end of 2021, data from Transparency Market Research shows.
Several other companies, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Databricks, also offer clean room capabilities.
The intent to acquire LeapYear comes just one month after Snowflake agreed to buy AI-based time series forecasting platform provider Myst AI, bringing the company’s acquisition tally to seven companies in three years.
In August 2022, it bought Polish-based AI-powered document analytics platform Applica to help companies handle unstructured data.
Other acquisitions included Streamlit (March 2022), Polish custom software company Pragmatists (January 2022), Polish digital product development studio Polidea (February 2021), and Canadian data anonymization company CryptoNumerics (July 2020 ).
San Francisco-based LeapYear Technologies, which was founded in 2014 by Christopher Hockenbrocht, Colton Jang and Ishaan Nerurkar, has raised $53.2 million in funding to date. Investors in the company include venture capital firms like Bain Capital and Lightspeed.
As part of the acquisition, the LeapYear team is expected to join Snowflake, Perry wrote.
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