In recent times, there is a surging data-dependance for all critical business decisions and a never ending need of data to feed machine learning. However, companies are prevented from collaborating on and valorising sensitive data because of cyber risks, fear of losing competitive edge and regulatory constraints.
Zurich-based Tune Insight helps organisations overcome this challenge. Now, the startup has secured $3.4 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round was led by 14Peaks Capital with participation of US-based Inflection.xyz, Debiopharm (that backed Iktos) and Zurich Cantonal Bank. Existing investor Wingman Ventures (which invested in Ascento and SAEKI Robotics) also participated in the funding round.
Tune Insight will use this funding round to strengthen its position for confidential collaborative analytics and machine learning in healthcare, financial services and cybersecurity, strengthen sales and marketing teams, and accelerate international expansion in Europe and the US. Furthermore, the investment will help the Swiss startup automate collective intelligence extraction, reduce data liability, streamline compliance, while re-enforcing data security and privacy.
Juan R. Troncoso Pastoriza, co-founder & CEO of Tune Insight, has been working on privacy-enhancing technologies since 2005 commented: “The data economy falls short of its promise for very valuable, highly confidential or regulated data. In a data-driven world, protecting data not only at rest and in transit, but also in-use, is paramount. Combined with the increasing need for organisations to work together with others, both for collaborations and valorisation, and progress towards more protections for citizens and customer data through regulations like GDPR, robust applied cryptography solutions that combine the best privacy-enhancing technologies are of greatest importance in all domains. At Tune Insight, our vision is to transform the paradigm of the data economy into an insight economy that better protects sensitive data, that is more secure, fair, and protective of privacy and confidentiality rights”.
Edoardo Ermotti, Founder and Managing Partner of 14Peaks Capital, commented: “Tune Insight stands at the forefront of addressing a critical gap in the realm of confidential collaborative analytics. Their software, situated at the intersection of AI/ML, SaaS, and data security, offers compelling applications across industries, including financial services. This aligns seamlessly with the core values and strategic focus we have at 14Peaks Capital. We are excited about this partnership and look forward to contributing to Tune Insight’s next phase of growth, continuing to revolutionise enterprise collaboration on sensitive and regulated data while mitigating the customary associated risks.”
Alexander Lange, Founding Partner at Inflection.xyz added: “We believe that AI’s bottlenecks won’t be software development, tooling or algorithms but access to raw compute and high quality data sets. Tune Insight is making a breakthrough contribution to the latter by building an operating system for model training on confidential data without leakage. For the first time, adversarial stakeholders operating across multiple levels of a given value chain are economically motivated to collaborate. This will lead to significant efficiency gains and better products for their customers.”
Pascal Mathis, Founding Partner, Wingman Ventures, added: “Tune Insight is the poster child of a Swiss startup on its way to global success: born on deep technology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, with a complementary team of experienced international co-founders, supported by the Swiss startup ecosystem, and signing as first customers Swiss companies that are world leaders in healthcare and financial services. Tune Insight is now ready to build on those early successes to accelerate towards becoming a global leader in secure collective data analytics and machine learning across industries. At Wingman, we are proud to have been Tune Insight’s first investor at pre-seed. ”
Privacy-preserving machine learning solution
Tune Insight was founded in 2021 by Juan R. Troncoso Pastoriza, Frederic Pont, Romain Bouyé and Jean-Pierre Hubaux. The startup is a confidential collaborative analytics and privacy-preserving machine learning solution. Furthermore, the company is also working towards extending support for privacy-preserving generative AI.
The company is a privacy-preserving machine learning solution on a mission to replace the data economy with a secure insight economy where raw sensitive data doesn’t move and is never revealed, enabling companies to collaborate and valorise their data and models, without ever losing control of their value.
Tune Insight’s applications
In the world of healthcare, Tune Insight’s software is deployed at care provider and pharmaceutical companies, enabling applications like collective survival analysis for oncology, personalised reference ranges, or secure federated learning on dermatology images across jurisdictions, enabling more personalised and value-based based healthcare.
Tune Insight is deployed at University Hospital Zurich, CHUV in Lausanne, Inselspital in Bern, Switzerland. It powers applications such as survival analysis for precision oncology and personalised reference ranges. The latter application enables practitioners to rely on up-to-date reference ranges for their patients, based on collective data of 9 million data points from over 250’000 patients, instead of outdated ranges from a less relevant population.
In other sectors, Tune Insight’s solutions are used by actuaries to facilitate collective risk computations for insurances and in financial services for collective fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML) and combating financing of terrorism. In cybersecurity, Tune Insight works with managed security service providers (MSSPs) and Armassuisse, the procurement branch of the Swiss military, enabling collective cyber resilience to better defend against cyber attacks.
