Why we Invested: Nth Party
Several of us at TBD Angels have built careers in creating successful data solutions and understand the power of harnessing data. However, we’ve seen firsthand that data by itself is a commodity. Often compared to being the new oil, data needs to be refined and crafted in order to extract its full value. And when crafted from multiple data sets, new products are created, new insights are derived and strategies are formed. In parallel, data owners need peace of mind knowing that their proprietary assets are protected especially when collaborating with other data owners.
Sitting at the crossroads of data protection and collaboration is Nth Party; their proprietary IP facilitates “collaboration without sharing.” Its software enables secure, confidential computation over data without ever creating a central database of proprietary or sensitive information, creating an opportunity for workflows where personally identifiable information (PII) can never be leaked between internal teams or to external companies.
To that end, data hubs that have members requesting benchmarks, or that could benefit from better data collaboration (or that just want to avoid dependence on clean rooms) have a tremendous opportunity to do so while lowering risk and cost.
As such, TBD Angels is excited to invest in Nth Party on many levels: we recognize the market need that they are addressing; the team is stellar and their approach to enable safe data sharing is compelling.
People
We admire the founding team. Shereen Shermak and Adam Towvim are serial entrepreneurs and have successful track records in value creation; while Andrei Lapets and Frederick Jansen are recognized leaders in the field of multi-party computing (MPC), the foundation of Nth Party’s approach to data encryption and collaboration. To that end, the team has an ideal blend of business veterans and experts in the MPC field — they are well positioned to capitalize on it.
Product
Nth Party’s initial product possesses the “better, faster, cheaper” attributes of a market leader. The platform enables web-based multi-party computation (MPC) in real-time thereby making workflows easier for disparate data owners to operationalize their data compared to other solutions. What’s more, Nth Party enables data encryption and collaboration at a fraction of the cost of market alternatives — primarily third party clean rooms.
Market
Nth Party is skating towards “where the puck is headed” particularly in the marketing technology (martech) industry. As martech privacy regulations tighten, first party data companies move towards owning their data stacks and sharing less information with customers than before. The confluence of trends could lead to slow down in data innovation and new products. Nth Party works within these constraints and is therefore in a pole position to not only help companies further protect their data, but more importantly, Nth Party helps data owners innovate — to create new products through collaboration and “co-opetition” with other data owners — with the highest regard to data privacy.
Beyond its initial focus, there are numerous possibilities beyond martech. Nth Party can help companies in other data intensive industries such as healthcare and finance. For example, Nth Party can facilitate industry benchmarking across customers and competitors similar to what credit bureaus provide. Insurance companies can list-share to identify bad actors intent on committing fraud. Private industries can collaborate with government entities for public health use cases — imagine post infection contact tracing between airlines and public health agencies in identifying super spreaders of COVID-19.
The opportunities for facilitating safe data sharing are tremendous, and we are excited to partner with Nth Party as they start their journey. The team coupled with their technical expertise is well positioned to ultimately become a market leader in this burgeoning space.
Phuc Truong is a member of TBD Angels
