Samooha, a startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration platform, announced today that it has raised $12.5 million in a round of funding backed by Altimeter Capital and Snowflake Ventures, among others. CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said the cash infusion — the first of the bunch — will be put towards product development and recruitment; The plan is to grow the startup’s team from 14 developers to roughly 20 by the end of the year.
So, you might be wondering, what exactly does Samuha do? In short, the platform allows businesses to securely share, collaborate, and gain insights from their and their partners’ data, regardless of the underlying cloud and data stack.
This is not a new concept. “Data clean rooms” have been touted for a while by both tech giants and startups as the ideal solution for sharing sensitive data in computing environments. Just a few years ago, Harbor raised $38.5 million for its technology to help enterprises exchange and securely share troves of big data. InfoSum and Decentriq also offer secure data-sharing tools, while Amazon Web Services recently launched a new data clean room product — called Clean Rooms, appropriately — for companies that routinely share data with outside partners.
In terms of Samooha’s differentiation, it leans heavily on the Snowflake ecosystem — which isn’t exactly surprising given Snowflake’s involvement in startup fundraising. A native app on Snowflake, Samooha provides a no-code UI that customers can use to access and build clean room apps. Trust boundaries built into Snowflake’s native apps framework provide a secure computing environment, Sivaramakrishnan explained in an interview with TechCrunch, while Eliminating the need for any data migration.
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“Security guarantees are technically enforced through cryptographic multi-party computation technology and through user-defined policies such as authorized query templates. It enables fast and secure analysis on collective data in a clean room,” he added. “Think of a very intuitive collaboration product experience like Slack where you’re not just communicating with colleagues in one channel but actually learning, sharing and collaborating around the data you and your partner own by running analytics workloads and not securing the data. That channel or room.”
Samooha particularly wants to pursue verticals it believes may be underserved, such as healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail and entertainment. Media in particular can be profitable; Gartner predicts that by 2023, 80% of advertisers with media budgets of $1 billion or more will use data clean rooms.
Sivaramakrishnan claims Samoha already has Fortune 500 customers, though he would not name them. The sales pitch was made easier by the pandemic, he said, because it highlighted the need for data collaboration across industries in a safe, secure fashion.
It probably depends on the industry — an August 2022 survey by Habu found that more than half of marketing professionals have never used a data clean room. But Samuha’s early traction indicates that there is some truth to Sivaramakrishnan’s claim.
“Broadly speaking, using customer, consumer and enterprise data is a fact of life in any industry and use case. But most businesses have an incomplete view of customer and consumer data,” said Sivaramakrishnan. “The pandemic has highlighted the need for data collaboration in a safe, secure fashion across multiple industries, be it healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, and more … with commercial models. Combined our technology and product approach gives us confidence that we are uniquely addressing a critical enterprise data function and, therefore, have the potential to withstand headwinds.”
