Skyflow Expands Regional Data Residency Support for Companies

Skyflow has expanded its data residency support for companies that need to keep certain information inside defined borders. In today's market, you probably can't keep EU customer data in, say, South America and vice versa, so companies need to take care to keep certain information at home in the market where it was sourced from. Skyflow started life as a tool to help companies store personally identifying information, or PII, in a secure manner. Its API helps companies handle all the difficult privacy, encryption and data issues of storing PII and other forms of potentially radioactive data for its customers, we wrote when we last covered the company.

The startup, which most recently closed a $45 million Series B in late 2021, can now support data residency requirements in Japan, India, Indonesia and Bahrain. The work, Skyflow CEO Anshu Sharma explained to TechCrunch+, will allow software companies to offer their services in more markets, more quickly, while meeting local regulatory requirements concerning where the data lives and the safe storage of personal user information. Sharma argued that his company's newly expanded regional data storage capabilities will provide ways to help other companies avoid the complexity of spinning up their own data storage and security frameworks simply to launch in new markets. Skyflow's work to support more regions wasn't cheap. Sharma said that the work had a high fixed cost, which Skyflow could afford because it raised a lot of money, enabling it to take on the infrastructure and operational costs for its customers. (As an aside, this is what venture capital is for: to build ahead of revenue in hopes of collecting outsized market share.)

Generative AI Support

Skyflow initially focused on offering its service to the fintech and health care verticals. However, it recently built a version of its data storage service to support generative AI services. Per Sharma, his startup started getting calls from customers a few months back about generative AI and how those companies need to keep not just PII, but internally sensitive data as well, away from LLMs. He said that demand is coming from both bottoms-up usage of generative AI tools and executive-level curiosity. Both corporate drones and corporate demigods alike want to use generative AI, but they don't want to get into trouble with the sort of data leaks we've already seen in the market.

Skyflow, data residency, data privacy, PII, generative AI, software companies