Transcend raises $40 million to address data privacy issues

Transcend 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.”

Transcend’s sales data has found that when placed head-to-head against the market’s legacy incumbent solution, Transcend wins in nearly 9 out of 10 cases. These companies find that Transcend’s technical platform reduces risk, enables business innovation grounded in compliant data usage, drives operational efficiencies, and crucially, helps them to build trust with their customers through responsible data practices.

“Our Transcend implementation has resulted in significantly greater compliance. Privacy requests have increased substantially and response time has decreased by 75%. Transcend’s Premier support offering is a spectacular value and the individuals I have worked with are highly knowledgeable. ‘Transcend’ has become part of the language of the enterprise. It is understood that applications must be connected to Transcend, particularly remarkable since we are a global company,” said Chad Rosenthal, AGC, Privacy & Digital Platforms at LG Electronics.

The global data privacy software market is growing at a 40% CAGR and will be valued at $30B by 2030. This is in part due to increased public interest in data privacy in recent years, as well as the rampant adoption of AI across industries, which has added new layers of complexity to how companies use and protect data. Without appropriate safeguards, AI tools can expose companies to confidentiality, data privacy, consumer safety, brand trustworthiness, and intellectual property risks.

Transcend’s platform is uniquely positioned to support AI adoption within the enterprise, with effective data mapping and governance becoming fundamental to the responsible adoption of AI technology.

For example, the recently approved EU AI Act requires AI providers and deployers to adopt strict data governance practices, publish transparency notices that accurately describe their data management procedures, and develop detailed technical documentation describing data collection, cleaning and provenance practices. Transcend streamlines and automates all these processes, and more.

Today, companies like LG Electronics, Plaid, Brex, Hims & Hers, and Rippling––as well as confidential Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies––choose Transcend as their privacy and governance partner. Transcend has also delivered actionable data rights to over 1.2 billion people globally.