X1
X1 CEO Craig Carpenter
- Los Angeles startup X1 helps businesses keep track of "data in the wild," from inappropriate emails and photos to sensitive company information being shared improperly by employees.
- CEO Craig Carpenter said the big data analytics startup is providing an important service at a time when businesses need to stay on top of the way data is being stored and handled for privacy and compliance reasons.
- "It could be anything, harassing photos or emails," Carpenter told Business Insider. "They can take action. They can delete it. They can pop it up in front of a user and say, 'Hey, listen, this does appear to be appropriate. We've got a problem here."
- Here's the pitch deck X1 used to raise $5 million from investors including Palisades Growth Capital:
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Businesses nowadays deal with a deluge of data, much of it stored in all sorts of devices and accounts that are not easy to monitor.
Tracking all of that information can be critically important for businesses for legal reasons, or to simply be aware of what's going on in the organization.
The Los Angeles startup X1 uses big data analytics to help business track what CEO Craig Carpenter calls "data in the wild," which covers confidential company documents to jokes and photos shared by employees on their network. The startup's customers include Disney, Chevron, and Bank of America.
"We have, you know, gobs and gobs of data out there," he told Business Insider. "They don't know if they have all sorts of really bad information in their system that they don't have it in a file share somewhere so you can audit and you can take action."
The challenge for most businesses, he said, is that "less and less corporate data over the last 5 to 10 years is in structured systems that are managed by corporations by more." In many cases, businesses must deal with information in semi or unstructured format, and it's not necessarily under a company's control," he added.
The information may be stored in multiple laptops and other devices, or in a Dropbox folder and other tools that may or not be supported by the company, Carpenter said.
And it's important for businesses to know where their information is located to comply with privacy and transparency regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act which just took effect this year and the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. The information could also be useful and even critical in internal investigations and risk assessment audits or in legal disputes.
"It's for legal proceedings," he said. "It's for investigations. It's for monitoring. It's for privacy settings."
The data "could be anything," Carpenter said. "It could be harassing photos or emails, whatever the case may be. And they can take an action or delete it. They can pop it up in front of a user and say, "Hey, listen, this does appear to be appropriate. We've got a problem here."
Launched in 2003, X1 was initially focused on using analytics to boost business productivity before pivoting to data discovery and compliance, Carpenter said.
The startup raised $5.1 million from investors, including Palisades Growth Capital and George Kadifa, the former head of HP Software.
Here's the pitch deck X1 used: