Venture capital firms and longtime tech execs are making a bet on Codified, a new startup out of Seattle that aims to help companies get a better handle on how to manage internal data access standards.
Founded last year after being incubated at Madrona Venture Labs, the 5-person company announced a $4 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group and Vine Ventures, with participation from Soma Capital.
Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia also invested, along with SAP exec and former Microsoft VP JG Chirapurath, and Shireesh Thota, vice president of databases at Microsoft.
Codified founder and CEO Yatharth Gupta spent more than 14 years at Microsoft, where he helped lead Azure-related data access and management projects. More recently he was a senior vice president of product management at enterprise database company SingleStore.
Gupta is pulling from his vast experience working with data access to build Codified, which describes itself as an end-to-end data governance operating system. It’s using generative AI to let users create data access rules by simply writing the policies in plain English.
The idea is to help companies speed up and improve how they decide who has access to what data, for what reason, and for how long.
Gupta said his market research shows that most companies rely on in-house engineers to do this type of work — which can be problematic given the duration and intensity required.
He also found that companies often deal with extremes when it comes to their data: it is either too difficult to access or exposed too widely.
“This is a problem that the industry has done a terrible, terrible job [with],” Gupta said.
Increasing data regulations, more investment in cybersecurity, and the sheer amount of data required to power AI systems are all tailwinds helping propel Codified, said Gupta.
The company is working with early partners and plans to launch its product later this year.
Other execs at Codified include Stefan Batres, former director of engineering at Tableau Software, and Karan Thakker, former senior software engineer at ExtraHop and Alation.
“Data is widely acknowledged to be an important asset for nearly every company, but managing access to this exponentially growing and critical asset relies on manual processes that are cumbersome, error-prone, and extremely time-consuming to audit,” S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director at Madrona, said in a statement. “Codified is built for any company wrestling with data governance solutions, offering just-in-time access and protection in alignment with company policies.”
