The privacy computing track reproduces billions of dollars in financing.
On March 9, privacy computing company Tree of Light Technology announced that it has received two consecutive rounds of financing, namely from the fourth paradigm of strategic financing and exclusive investment from Shenzhen Venture Capital, with a total amount of nearly 100 million yuan in Series A.
This round of funds will be mainly used to strengthen the research and development of underlying technologies, serve market development, strengthen talent layout, and enhance the multi-scenario landing ability of Tree of Light technology products.
Founded in 2017, Tree of Light Technology is one of the pioneers in the field of privacy computing in China, and has participated in the formulation of a number of technical standards in the field of national and industrial privacy computing. Founder and CEO Zhang Jiachen graduated from Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government, and was jointly trained by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and served as the chief operating officer of the Minibot robot business of Xiaomi's ecological chain enterprise and a senior product manager at Amazon.
In the early days of its establishment, Tree of Light Technology received seed round financing from Ceyuan Venture Capital, Xinyuan Capital, Chaosheng Capital and Kuaichuang Venture Capital. Since then, the company has received two rounds of financing from China Chengxin Credit and Jianfeng Qiyun in May 2018 and February 2020 respectively.
Solve the dilemma of data application and realize that data is "available and unsightly"
At present, the digital economy is regarded as one of the important engines of China's economic growth, so data has become a new asset in the era of digital economy. However, at the level of data application, there has long been a dilemma, that is, ownership and use rights cannot be separated. In the process of data sharing and model training between data owners and other companies, because data can be copied infinitely, it is difficult to guarantee that the original data will not be reused or even information leaked.
In order to solve the above problems, Tree of Light uses technologies such as federated learning, multi-party security technology, and confidential computing based on chip TEE (trusted computing) technology to help customers achieve data analysis and computing under the premise of protecting the data itself from being leaked to the outside world.
At present, Tree of Light Technology has developed a number of products such as "Tree of Light Privacy Computing Platform", "Cloud Federated Learning Platform", "Tree of Light Data Collaboration Service Platform", "Tree of Light Multi-party Security Computing Platform", "Automated Machine Learning Platform" and so on. One of its core products, the "Tianji Trusted Computing Framework", is a trusted computing system based on the trusted execution environment (TEE) and other encryption technologies in the chip, mainly by sharing data from the sharing to the joint computing in the trusted execution environment created by hardware, so that the data is available and invisible, ensuring data privacy, security and compliance. At the same time, the relevant records of data sharing are bookkeeped and traced by the blockchain.
From the perspective of application scenarios, The customer of The Tree of Light has covered many industries such as banking, insurance, communications, advertising, medical and government affairs.
In the financial field, The Tree of Light mainly helps large financial institutions to build data collaboration alliances, integrate multiple data open systems such as taxation, medical treatment, logistics, and data resources of data application entities such as banks and insurance companies, and realize the authorization, release, and sharing of data completely online; in the government affairs field, Tree of Light effectively protects the data of government departments based on the combination of privacy protection computing and other technologies, solves the problem of government data islands to a certain extent, and improves government governance capabilities. It also helps major data exchanges to achieve the delivery of data products.
In addition, Tree of Light Technology also uses privacy computing to help more enterprises upgrade their industrial digital intelligence. In the cooperation with SF, The Tree of Light helped SF to establish a risk identification model for individual customers, which enabled the customer coverage of SF's "send first, pay later" service to achieve several times improvement.
Up to now, Tree of Light has served dozens of customers, and its products and solutions have been applied to China UnionPay, Zhongyuan Bank, China Insurance Industry Association, Shenzhen Longhua District Government, Guiyang Big Data Development Bureau, SF and other financial institutions, government departments and well-known technology companies. At the same time, Tree of Light Technology has also carried out strategic cooperation with Huawei, Haiguang, Tencent and other enterprises. It is worth noting that the fourth paradigm, one of the investors in this round, is also one of the customers and strategic partners of The Tree of Light.
In terms of team, The Tree of Light currently has a team size of nearly 100 people, of which the R & D team accounts for more than 80%, including the country's top computer and cryptography experts, who have worked in Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other enterprises. Yuan Chen, chief algorithm and cryptography scientist of the company, holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Fudan University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and his postdoctoral supervisor is Professor Ronald Cramer, a fellow of the International Cryptography Society and president of the European Cryptography Society, and is also the scholar with the largest number of papers on privacy computing in mainland China at the top three international cryptography conferences.
According to Zhang Jiachen, founder and CEO of Tree of Light Technology, the company's next round of financing is also in progress.
The market size is nearly 10 billion, and private computing is still in its early stages
The rise of private computing has activated the shared value of data and is seen as a key breakthrough in the development of shared intelligence technologies. Driven by rising market demand and new technologies, the current privacy computing is in a window of development.
According to gartner data from market research institute, by 2024, the global expenditure on privacy-driven data protection and compliance technology will exceed 15 billion US dollars, that is, more than 100 billion yuan; according to KPMG, the domestic market size of privacy computing will develop rapidly, and after three years, technology service revenue is expected to reach 10-20 billion yuan of space, and even leverage the 100 billion data platform operating revenue space.
Under the broad market prospects, capital with a keen sense of smell is also moving. According to CVSource investment data, as of now, there are nearly 70 financing incidents in the field of privacy computing, and there are many investors such as Sequoia China, IDG Capital, and GSR Venture Capital.
In Zhang Jiachen's view, behind the popularity of privacy computing, there are two main reasons:
The first is favorable policies. In the past two years, various bills on network data security and personal privacy security have been introduced, requiring market participants and data processors to take security technical measures to ensure data security.
"The bill emphasizes 'both data security and the protection of data transactions and circulation', and between both and between, the only feasible optimal solution at present is privacy computing, and under the impetus of policies, the privacy computing industry is ushering in a major benefit." Zhang Jiachen said.
The second is market demand. Not long ago, IDC mentioned in the "2022 China ICT Market Forecast" report that by 2024, the policy requirements for data privacy, security, placement, use, disclosure and other aspects will force 80% of large Chinese enterprises to reorganize their data governance processes on an autonomous basis.
However, Zhang Jiachen also stressed that the overall development of the current privacy computing field is still in the early stages, and there are still many challenges.
First, the regulations are not yet clear. At present, the domestic practice scenarios and effects of privacy computing have not yet been standardized, in the process of data circulation, which data can be circulated, which cannot be circulated, whether the circulation place is in-market or off-site, these details need to be further clarified to reach an industry consensus.
Secondly, as an emerging technology that has just emerged, privacy computing also needs to go through a process of educating the market, and it is necessary to let customers and even investors perceive the specific role of privacy computing through practical applications. In order to achieve application landing, in addition to requiring enterprises to have the technical capabilities of privacy computing itself, they also need to have the ability to understand data sources, build scenarios and integrate resources, which is very difficult for most startups. At this time, enterprises have to face a problem - whether to build themselves or cooperate, but no matter which way they choose, it puts forward a huge test for the integration of their own resources and the boundaries of their capabilities. In addition, according to Zhang Jiachen, the cycle of a standard privacy computing product from the beginning of research and development to the landing is about one year, and a lot of manpower and funds are also needed in this process.
"If the development of the entire industry is compared to 24 hours a day, then the current domestic privacy computing is still in the 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning stage, which means that there are still more development opportunities and possibilities in the field." As a member of the track, we hope to create value first, and then pass on value to all walks of life through the right model, which is the most important thing that Tree of Light Technology considers at present. Zhang Jiachen said. (Text/Wang Manhua, Source/Touzhong.com)