SAN FRANCISCO — Transcend, developer of a data privacy platform, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by new investor StepStone Group, with participation from HighlandX and existing investors Accel, Index Ventures, 01 Advisors (01A), Script Capital, and South Park Commons. This brings the total raised to nearly $90 million.
Since its last fundraise, Transcend has expanded beyond offering “a virtual kill-switch for consumers to delete data,” and is now a comprehensive Privacy and AI Governance suite of 12 products that transform how enterprises understand and manage personal data, automate privacy tasks, assess risks, and oversee AI systems.
Most companies use legacy privacy platforms built on manual workflows: interviewing data owners, data entry, and assigning operational work across teams. Transcend focuses on encoding privacy controls directly into business systems, with a novel approach centered around the full privacy lifecycle of personal data, including data discovery and classification, consent and preference management, and automating operational workflows, such as responding to data deletion and access requests.
“Trying to solve today’s privacy challenges with legacy platforms is like throwing a glass of water at a house fire—it’s hopeless,” said Transcend CEO Ben Brook. “This month marks the sixth anniversary of GDPR, and we’re in the middle of another wave of comprehensive legislation with the EU AI Act and a draft U.S. federal privacy law. Yet privacy remains a fundamentally unsolved problem inside companies. Most have neither a clear view of their data, nor effective privacy controls installed directly into their systems. And now, new AI use cases are kicking this problem right up to the boardroom door.”
“Legacy solutions that rely on heavily operational processes cannot meet this moment. Privacy problems have to be solved at the data system level, with infrastructure that orchestrates personal data directly across all business systems. That’s how we’ve built the Transcend platform since day one, and this latest fundraise will help us meet the demand for a transition to modern privacy technology,” said Brook.
“Transcend takes a radically different approach to solving modern data privacy problems by tackling it at the code level, which is one of the many reasons we’ve invested in the company,” said John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group. “What’s also remarkable is how often they’re moving companies with complex data requirements off inefficient legacy platforms and point solutions, and onto their next-generation platform—what an incredible signal of future success.”
