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Apheris: Berlin-based startup deep-tech startup specializing in co-operative data ecosystems has successfully garnered €8.7 million during a seed round extension. Apheris claims that the said funding will fuel the development and enhancement of their platform, and organizations will easily extract value through decentralized data; security and compliance will be given due care
Founded in 2019 by CEO Robin Röhm and CTO Michael Höh, Apheris has built a platform for secure data collaboration across organizational boundaries. By applying cutting-edge technologies like federated machine learning, differential privacy, and secure multi-party computation, Apheris enables organizations to jointly analyze data without having to share or move their data.
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Funding Details
The seed extension round, which saw an investment of €8.7 million, was led by Octopus Ventures and saw the participation of the existing investors such as LocalGlobe, Dig Ventures, and Another.VC. It also attracted new investors such as former CFO of Google Patrick Pichette, Heal Capital, co-founder of Target Partners Berthold von Freyberg, and Instana founder Mirko Novakovic.
Strategic Objectives
The new funds will be used for a number of important initiatives:
- Platform Development: Apheris is going to continue developing its platform to be use-case agnostic so that data collaboration can be achieved across industries seamlessly.
- Market Growth: The company is going to expand its customer base. It has existing partnerships with industry leaders such as BASF, Boston Consulting Group, BMW Group, and Johnson & Johnson’s innovation division, JLABS.
- Talent Acquisition: Apheris plans to grow its team of more than 30 experts, accelerating innovation and supporting its growth trajectory.
Read more: Hamming.ai Secures $3.8Mto Enhance AI Voice Agent Reliability
Overcoming Challenges in Data Collaboration
Organizations often face significant hurdles in data collaboration due to regulatory, governance, and privacy concerns. Apheris addresses these challenges by ensuring that data remains within the owner’s secure environment. This approach allows for collaborative analysis without compromising data security or compliance, effectively breaking down data silos and enhancing machine learning capabilities with higher-quality data.
Leadership Perspectives
The mission, according to CEO and co-founder Robin Röhm, is “to ensure that the greatest challenges our planet is facing can only be solved if organisations can use each other’s data. And so we commit ourselves to enabling industries to work collaboratively by removing the need for data sharing and breaking down the complexities, risks, and barriers that have previously made it almost impossible.
Connor Scanlan, Investment Manager at Octopus Ventures, said: “The Apheris team is enabling organizations to solve the critical problem of ensuring that data privacy is protected while still allowing them to leverage the endless positive power of data collaboration. In doing so, they unlock huge benefits across industries.”
Technological Innovation
Apheris uses state-of-the-art technologies to enable secure data collaboration:
- Federated Machine Learning: The possibility of training machine learning models on multiple decentralized data sources without moving the data around.
- Differential Privacy: Guarantees that the output of data analyses does not compromise individual data entries, maintaining privacy.
- Secure Multi-Party Computation: It enables parties to jointly compute functions over their inputs while keeping those inputs private.
All these technologies collectively ensure that data collaboration is both secure and compliant with regulatory standards.
Industry Applications
Apheris’ platform finds applicability across sectors as varied as:
- Health care: Enables cross-company research and development without divulging patient information.
- Manufacturing: Companies may share insights while keeping proprietary data private.
- Automotive: For joint development such as autonomous drive technologies, where sensitive data can be kept concealed.
By empowering secure data sharing, Apheris is best placed to take innovation to a new level within these sectors.
Future Outlook
With the investment of new funds, Apheris is on a good footing for the expansion of its platform in terms of enhanced capabilities and scope of market outreach. The firm will continue building its technology that supports various usage cases to allow organizations to mutually benefit from sharing data in their quest to solving complex problems together. This only improves the single organizational capability but rather contributes to a solution of broader global issues using collective intelligence.
Summary
Apheris’ successful funding of €8.7 million marks a major milestone in the evolution toward secure collaborative data ecosystems. By empowering organizations to co-analyze data without compromising security or compliance, Apheris is laying down a step toward opening up a new era of innovation. As the company continues to improve its platform and build expansive reach, it will have the capability to make a great difference across various industries.
