The past decade has seen data grow in increasing importance to enterprise software, and this role has become even more pronounced recently with the rise of large language models. At the same time, there has been a corresponding increase in regulation around the use of this data, and figuring out how to stay compliant is more critical and challenging than ever.
That’s where Coded, an early-stage startup raised last year at venture capital firm Madrona Ventures, is coming to the fore. The company was built from the ground up by a data veteran with an eye on solving the data compliance problem and today announced a $4 million seed round.
The company’s founder and CEO Yatharth Gupta sees that data is at the heart of today’s technology, yet companies struggle to control access to it. “Every company has a lot of data. They want people to use that data. In order for people to use this data, they want to make sure the right people have access and the wrong people don’t. It’s an incredibly hard problem for people to solve,” Gupta told TechCrunch.
“So at Codified our mission is simple. We want to boost your company’s innovation by making sure you can easily access data in a way that’s compatible within your company.”
As Gupta sees it, many large companies write policies and try to implement them in various ways, but he sees software that is too rigid for today’s use cases, leaving them vulnerable, especially when they need to change policy. It wants to change that by translating policy into code that can be implemented in a variety of ways, connect to various applications that need access to the data, and easily change as new customers or user categories emerge.
“We let you write policies in natural language, declaratively, or using a user interface—choose your favorite way—but once those policies are written, we can hardcode them into something that can be implemented in a variety of ways and can be very it changes easily,” he said.
To that end, the company also enables customers to set conditions, such as if you’ve had security training in the last 365 days or if you’re already part of a team working on a sensitive project. Ultimately, this enables companies to set hard-coded data access rules based on who the employee is and the applications they use or the projects they’re a part of, rather than relying on creating groups to base those rules on. . The problem with a team approach is that people move and change jobs, and teams don’t always keep up, he says.
Gupta’s background includes 15 years at Microsoft in various positions, including managing the Azure Databricks product, and a few years at Singlestor where he led product and engineering. Both jobs, he says, were heavily about data, and he saw the kinds of problems he’s trying to solve with Codified.
The product is still under development. Gupta has worked with several design partners to refine the concept and works with five full-time employees and another half-dozen contractors. He hopes to have a candidate release later this year.
Investors in today’s round include Vine Ventures, Soma Capital and Madrona Venture Labs where Codified was incubated last year.
