 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit NYC, we're in New York, so you've been here all day. Lisa Martin, John Furrier, talking with AWS partners, ecosystem folks, customers, AWS folks, you name it. Next up, one of our alumni rejoins us. Please welcome Antu Sharma, the co-founder and CEO of SkyFlow. Antu, great to have you back on theCUBE. Likewise, I'm excited to be back. So I love how you guys founded this company. Your inspiration was the Zero Trust Data Privacy Vault, pioneered by two of our favorites, Apple and Netflix. You started with a simple question. What if privacy had an API? So you built a data privacy vault delivered as an API. Talk to us, and it's only in the last three and a half years, talk to us about a data privacy vault and what's so unique about it. Sure, I think if you think about all the key challenges we are seeing in our personal lives when we're dealing with technology companies, a lot of anxiety is around what happens to my data, right? If you want to go to a pharmacy, they want to know not just your health ID number, but they want to know your social security number, your credit card number, your phone number, and all of that information is actually useful because they need to be able to engage with you. And it's true for hospitals, health systems. It's true for your bank. It's true for pretty much anybody you do business with, even an event like this. But then, question that keeps coming up is where does this data go and how is it protected? And the state of the art here has always been to keep it protected when it's in storage, but almost all the breaches, all the hacks happen not because you steal somebody's disk, but because someone enters through an API or a portal. So the question we asked was, we've been building different shapes of containers for different types of data. You don't store your logs in a data warehouse. You don't store your analytical data in a regular DBMS. Similarly, you don't store your passwords and usernames. You store them in identity systems. So if PII is so special, why isn't there a container that's used for storing PII? So that's how the idea of PII came up. So you guys just got a recent funding, a series B financing, which means, the folks out there that don't know the inside base, well, most do, means you're doing well. It's hard to get that round of funding. It means you're up and growing to the right. What's the differentiator? Why are you guys so successful? Why the investment growth? What's the momentum driver? So I think it's, in some ways, we took one of the most complex problems, data privacy, like half the people can't even describe, like, does data privacy mean I have to be GDPR compliant or does it actually mean I'm protecting the data? So you have multiple stakeholders in any company. If you're a pharma company, you may have a chief privacy offer, a data officer, this officer, that officer. And all of these people were talking and the answer was buy more tools. So if you look around behind our back, there's probably dozens of companies out there, one protecting data in an API call, another protecting data in a database, another one, data warehouse. But as a CEO, CTO, I want to know what happens to my social security number from a customer, end to end. So we said, if you can radically simplify the whole thing, and the key insight was you can simplify it by actually isolating and protecting this data. And this architecture evolved on its own at companies like Apple and other places, but it takes dozens of engineers for those companies to build it out. So we're like, well, the pattern makes sense. It logically kind of has this common sense. So instead of setting dozens of tools, we can just give you a very simple product, which is like one API call, you know, protect this data. It's like what Stripe is for a plugin for our financial transaction. You plug it into the app, similar dynamic here, right? Exactly. Stripe for payments, Twilio for telephony, we have API for everything, but if you have social security numbers or PAN numbers, you still are like relying on DIY. So I think what differentiated us and attracted the investors was, if this works, every company needs it. Well, integration's become the key thing. I got to ask you because you mentioned GDPR and all the complexities around the laws and the different regulations, that could be a real blocker and a wet blanket for innovation. Yes. The market we're seeing here at, it was Summit, New York, small event. 10,000 people, more people here than were at Snowflake Summit as an example. And they're the hottest company in data. So this small little New York event has proven that that world is growing. So why should this wet blanket, these rules slow it down? How do you balance it? Because that's a concern. If you check in all the boxes, you're never actually building anything. So, you know, we just ran into a couple of customers who still are struggling with moving from the data center to AWS cloud. Now, the fact that here means they want to, but something is holding them back. I also met the AI team of Amazon. They're doing some amazing work and they're like, the biggest hindrance for them is making customers feel safe when they do the machine learning because now you're opening up the data sets to more people. And in all of those cases, your innovation basically stops because CSO is like, look, you can't put PII in the cloud unprotected. And with the vault architecture, we call it privacy by architecture. So there's a term called privacy by design. I'm like, what the, is privacy by design? Right? It's an architecture. But if you have an architecture and a developer like me was like, I know what architecture is. I don't know what privacy by design is. So you guys are basically have that architecture by design, which means foundational based services. So you're providing that as a service. So other people don't have to build the complex. Exactly. You don't have to have the Apple's backend team to build out privacy with you. You get all that benefit. Exactly. And traditionally people have had to make compromises if you encrypt the data and secure it, then you can't use it. Using a proprietary polymorphic encryption technology, you can actually have your cake and eat it too. So what that means for customers is if you want to protect data in snowflake or redshade, you just use SkyFlow with it. We have integrations to databases, to data lakes, all the common workflow tools. You give us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what SkyFlow is delivering. Well, I'll give you two examples. One in the fintech space, one in the health space. So in the fintech space, there's a company called Nomi Health. They're a large payments processor for the health insurance market. And funnily enough, their CTO actually came from Goldman Sachs. He actually built Apple Card, right? That we all have in our phones. And he saw our product and he's like, for my new company, I'm going to just use you guys because I don't want to go hire 20 engineers. So for them, we had a HIPAA compliant environment, a PCI compliant environment, SOC2 compliant environment. And he can sleep better at night because he doesn't have to worry what is my engineer in Poland or Ukraine doing right now. I have a vault, I have rule set up, I can audit it, everything is logged. Similarly for Science 37, they run clinical trials globally. They wanted to solve data residencies. So for them, the problem was, how do I run one common global instance? When the rules say you have to break everything up and that's very expensive. So I love this, I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. I love it. You had me at hello API integration. I love it. How much does it cost? What's it going to cost me? How do I need to think about my operationalizing? Can I know what an API can do that? Yes. Am I paying by the usage, by the drink? How do I figure out that? So we have programs for startups where it's really, really inexpensive. We get them credits. And then for enterprises, we basically have a platform fee and then based on the amount of data, PII, we charge them. We don't nickel and dime the customers. We don't like the usage-based model because you don't know how many times you're going to hit an API. So we usually just based on the number of customer records that you have and you can hit them as many times as you want. There's no API elements. So unlimited record base, that's your variable. Exactly. We think about you buying odd zero, for example, for authentication, you pay them by the number of active users you have. So something similar. So you run on AWS, but you just announced a couple of new GTM partners, MuleSoft and Plaid. Can you talk to us about, start with MuleSoft. What are you doing and why? And the same with Plaid? Sure. I mean, MuleSoft was very interesting. Customers who were adopting our product said, we're buying this product for our new applications, but what about our legacy code? We can't go in there and add APIs there. So the simplest way to do integration in the legacy world is to use an integration broker. So that's where MuleSoft integration came out and we announced that it's a logical place for you to swap out real social security numbers with fake ones. And then we also announced a partnership with Snowflake. Same thing. I think every workload as it's moving to the cloud needs some kind of data protection with it. So I think going forward, we're going to be announcing even more partnerships so you can imagine all the places you're storing PII today, whether it's a call center solution or analytic solution, there's a PII story there. Talk about the integration aspect because I love the momentum. I get everything, make sure the customers, all these environments. Integrations are super important to plug into. And then how do I essentially operational on my side? Do I import the records? How do you connect to my environment, my databases? So it's really, really easy. When you enter the data and use SkyFlow Vault, we create what is called a format preserving token which is essentially replacing a social security number with something that looks like an SSN, but it's not. So that there's no schema changes involved. You just have to do that one time, swap over. And then in terms of integrations, most of these integrations are pre-built. So Snowflake integration is pre-built, MuSol integration is pre-built. We're going to announce some new ones. So the goal is for off the table platforms like Snowflake and MuleSoft, we pre-built all the integrations. You can build your own. It takes about like a day. And then in terms of data import, basically it's the same standard process that you would use with any other data store. Data, got to ask you about data breaches. Obviously the numbers in 2021 were huge. We're seeing so much change in the cyber security landscape, ransomware becoming a household word, a matter of when, but not if. How does SkyFlow help organizations protect themselves or reduce the number of breaches so that they are not the next headline? You know, the funny thing about breaches is again and again we see people doing the same mistakes. Right, so Equifax had a breach four years ago where a customer portal, you know, no customer support rep should have access to 100 million people's data. Like is that customer agent really accessing 100 million? But because we've been using legacy security tools, they either give you access or don't give you access. And that's not how it's going to work because if I'm going to engage with a pharmacy and airline, they need to be able to use my data in multiple different places. So you need to have fine-grained controls around it. So I think the reason we keep getting breaches is cybersecurity industry is selling tens of billions of dollars worth of tools in the name of security, but they cannot be applied at a fine-grained level enough. I can't say things like for my call center agent that's living in Phoenix, Arizona, they can only verify last four digits, but the same call center worker in Philippines can't even see that. So how do you get all that granular control in place is really why we keep seeing data breaches. So the Equifax breach, the Shopify breach, the Twitter breaches, they're all the same. Like again and again, it's either an inside person or an external person who's gotten in. And once you're in, and this is the whole idea of zero trust as you know, once you're in, you can access all the data. Zero trust means that you don't assume that you actually isolate PII separately. A lot of the cybersecurity issues, as you were talking about, are people-based. Somebody clicking on something or gaining access is, and I always talk to security experts about, how do you control the people aspect besides training, awareness, education, the sky flow, a facilitator of that in a way that we haven't seen before? Yeah, so I think what ends up happening is people, even after they have breaches, they will lock down the system that had the breach. But then they have the same data sitting in a partner database, maybe a customer database, maybe a billing system. So by centralizing and isolating PII in one system, you can then push roles-based access control rules. You can put limitations around it, but if you try to do that across hundreds of data bases, you're just not going to be able to do it because it's basically just literally impossible. My final question for you is, for me, is you're here at AWS Summit, it's 10,000 people, like I said. A lot more people here than some big events, and we're just in New York City. Okay, you obviously work with AWS. What's next for you guys as you get the fresh funding? You guys are looking for more talent. What's your next mountain you're going to climb? Tell us what's next for the company. Share your vision. Put a plug in for the company. Well, it's actually very simple. Today, we actually announced that we have a new Chief Revenue Officer who's joining us. Tammy, she's joined us from LaunchDarkly, which grew from single digits to over nine digits in revenue. And the reason she's joining Skyflow is because she sees the same inflection point hitting us. And for us, that means more marketing, more sales, more growth, and more geographies, and more partnerships. And we think there's never been a better time to solve privacy. Literally everything that we deal with, even things like Roe v. Wade issues, eventually ties back into an issue around privacy. Yes. AWS gets the model, API, come on, right? That's their model. Exactly. So I think if you look at the largest best companies that have been built in the last 20 years, they took something that should have been simple, but was not. There used to be avayas of the world selling telephony until Twilio came and said, look, an API. And we are trying to do the same to the entire security, compliance, and privacy industry, is to narrow the problem down and solve it once and for all. At least I have it. We're going to get the CUBE API. That's what we're going to do. All right. Thank you so much. Awesome. Anju, thank you for joining us, talking to us about what's new at Skyflow. It sounds like you got that big funding investment, probably lots of strategic innovation about to happen. So you'll have to come back in a few months and maybe next re-invent in six months and tell us what's new, what's going on. Last, the CUBE interview was very well received. People really liked the kind of questions you guys asked, so I love this show. And I think everybody's thinking. It's great when you're a star like you, you've got good market, great team, smart, and I mean, look at this. I mean, what slow down are we talking about here? Yeah, I don't see, man. Slow down, down the enterprise. Privacy is hot and it's incredibly important and we're only going to be seeing more and more of it. You can talk to any CIO, CISO, CTO, or the board and they will tell you there is no limit to the budget they have for solving the core privacy issues. And we love that. We want to move on to the building. We want to say that must make you smile. We saw a big problem. Thank you. Awesome, on to you. Thank you again. Congrats on the momentum and we'll see you next time and we'll hear more on the evolution of Skype that we appreciate your time. Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE live from New York City at AWS Summit NYC 22. We'll be right back with our next guest, so stick around.