The company was founded in 2014 and is based in Cape Town, South Africa. It offers consumer insights and market benchmarking, data partnership evaluations, customer data commercialization, and customer data exchange.
Omnisient is Africa’s first cloud-based privacy-preserving data collaboration platform and the leader in emerging markets.
Omnisient’s bank-grade cryptography protects consumer privacy and ensures compliance with global privacy regulations while enabling businesses to share and analyze first-party datasets in a secure and neutral cloud environment to draw new insights and generate new revenue.
Businesses using Omnisient can anonymize and protect customer data sets before sharing, to ensure personally identifiable information is never revealed.
It is also a developer of a data-sharing platform designed to protect customers’ data privacy and intellectual property. The company’s platform facilitates data collaboration between business entities and reduces the speed of data collaboration by applying technology to remove privacy and information security concerns, enabling businesses to innovate and grow profitability through secure data sharing economically.
Omnisient offers a Privacy-Preserving Data Collaboration platform that enables B2C businesses to collaborate on 1st party customer data securely, quickly, and easily while remaining fully compliant with consumer data privacy regulations, in control of their IP, and protected against the risk of a data breach.
Over 60 African businesses have already used the Omnisient Platform to create new opportunities and sources of revenue. Amongst those: are 3 of Africa’s largest Retailers, 4 major Insurers, Credit Bureaus, Healthcare providers, and 6 of Africa’s biggest Banks.
Over 148 million consumer records have been protected and anonymously linked for data collaboration and data monetization using Omnisient’s Crypto-Identity cryptography.
How it Works
Crypto Identity
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as name, email address, and phone numbers, is anonymized and tokenized on-premise to create irreversible Crypto-Identities.
A Crypto-Identity is a unique string of characters created based on a consumer record’s unique personally identifiable information and using cryptographic hashes and proprietary techniques in combination with each other to anonymize and tokenize a customer profile and enable matching across multiple consumer data sets.
The Crypto-Identities are encrypted in transit as they are uploaded to Omnisient’s Safe-Zone– a neutral escrow-like environment – for analysis by multiple businesses. Data owners never hand over their data to a 3rd party and they keep control at all times of what data is shared.
Collaborating businesses can see the overlap in shared consumers and match them to gain insights into their consumers beyond their business and run predictive models in a trust-by-design environment.
Data owners maintain full control over their data and eliminate the risk of a data breach since all sensitive information associated with consumer records is anonymized, tokenized, and encrypted and never out of the hands of the data owner.
Security
Omnisient creates a trust-by-design environment for data collaboration by using hashing cryptography that is impossible to reverse engineer.
This protects and anonymizes any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) before transferring the data to a secure and independent “safe zone” in the Cloud for manipulation and computation.
Businesses using Omnisient can draw new insights into their consumers beyond their engagement with their business or generate new revenue from data commercialization while protecting consumer privacy because personally identifiable information is never shared or revealed.
Additionally, your IP is never exchanged or shared with a 3rd party.
Founders
Jon Jacobson
Jon Jacobson is a software engineer and visionary entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in building businesses, raising capital, and designing consumer data software platforms.
Jon’s first leadership role was at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York City where he led the Global Financial Reporting team in delivering a suite of applications supporting over 300 financial controller users across CSFB globally.
Jon returned to South Africa to build an innovative, first-of-its-kind multi-channel marketing platform which eventually grew to support global omnichannel marketing campaigns for major FMCG brands such as Diageo and Levis.
Jon’s current venture is Africa’s first privacy-preserving data collaboration platform business, Omnisient, where he serves as CEO and CTO to lead the business in building the world’s biggest source of consumer intelligence.
Jon holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Economics, and Mathematics from Rhodes University in South Africa.
Mathew Mckie
Mathew Mckie is the Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Omnisient.
Anton Grutzmacher
Anton Grutzmacher is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Omnisient.
Anton attended the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
Investors & Funding Rounds
Nedbank, Investec Private Capital, Compass Venture Capital
Omnisient has landed a pre-Series A investment from Nedbank Corporate and Investment Banking, Investec Private Capital, and Compass Venture Capital.
The startup aims to next expand into the rest of Africa, likely in Nigeria where the company already offers Know your customer (KYC) services to data partners in Nigeria.
South Africa’s information regulator is pushing for the remaining provisions of POPI to be finalized and to come into effect. After the commencement date, companies will have 12 months to get their systems and processes in place to comply with the act.
Main Competitors
Prevedere: This is a provider of predictive analytics technology and solutions based on econometric modeling.
Exact Sales: It develops and offers cloud-based sales and pre-sales software for boosting sales for small and medium-sized businesses.
FRONTIER.COOL: Revolutionary 3D fabric material digitization and collaboration platform for the fashion and textile industries.
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