Tune Insight secures $3.4m as it pushes the boundaries from a data economy to a secure insight economy
Despite the ever increasing data-dependance for all critical business decisions and the never ending need of data to feed machine learning, companies are prevented from collaborating on and valorizing sensitive data because of cyber risks, fear of losing competitive edge and regulatory constraints. Helping organisations to overcome this hurdle, Tune Insight is today announcing a $3.4m funding round as it helps them automate collective intelligence extraction, reduce data liability, streamline compliance, while re-enforcing data security and privacy.
The oversubscribed seed funding round was led by 14Peaks Capital with participation of US-based Inflection.xyz, Debiopharm and Zurich Cantonal Bank. Existing investors Wingman Ventures also participated in the funding round. 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.
The genesis of Tune Insight lies in 2016, when Swiss hospitals came to the founders (then researchers) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) asking if the latest progress in applied cryptography could help solve a challenge they could not overcome, but paramount for personalized healthcare: hospitals wanted to collaborate with each other, but without transferring or revealing their patient data to others. Today, Tune Insight is deployed at University Hospital Zurich, CHUV in Lausanne, Inselspital in Bern, Switzerland, and powers applications such as survival analysis for precision oncology and personalized 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ranges for their patients, based on collective data of 9 million data points from over 250,000 patients, instead of outdated ranges from a less relevant population.
For University Spital Basel, Tune Insight enables the secure training of dermatology machine learning models on skin images across jurisdictions. Tune Insight solutions also bridge the trust gap between payers like Groupe Mutuel with care providers for value-based healthcare (VBHC), and pharmaceutical companies with hospitals for streamlined access to real-word evidence (RWE).
In other domains, 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.
The confidential computing operations supported by the Tune Insight platform range from private set intersection to advanced data analytics to secure federated learning on structured data, including images, which play an increasing role in healthcare and for predictive maintenance. Tune Insight is also working at extending support for privacy-preserving generative AI. Starting from secure data collaborations and privacy-preserving federated learning, Tune Insight is accompanying its customers towards data and model valorization.
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 organizations to work together with others, both for collaborations and valorization, 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”.
Tune Insight will deploy 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.
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 revolutionize enterprise collaboration on sensitive and regulated data while mitigating the customary associated risks.”
Alexander Lange, Founding Partner at Inflection.xyz remarked: “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.”
