Immuta adds accountability and control for project-based data science

Fresh off $8 million in Series A financing, Immuta is releasing the second version of its data science governance platform. With the democratization of machine learning comes new risks for businesses that have too many workers manipulating data sets and models without oversight.  The Immuta platform helps companies maintain an understanding of how digital assets are applied and shared across a company.

Immuta’s fully Dockerized platform is something of a “Google Docs” for data scientists. To ensure privacy compliance and proper implementation, managers can effectively track changes and set permissions and sharing settings — in addition to more complex auditing features. The version being launched today adds the concept of “Projects” to the platform. This enables data management at the granularity of a specific task that brings together multiple people and data sources.

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Mathew Carroll, CEO of Immuta, explained to me in an interview that the goal of Immuta is to provide transparency and accountability. The startup is targeting customers in the middle of the road in their machine learning adoption. This only really excludes companies that live under a rock and companies that have their own internal full-stack machine learning infrastructure, like Facebook or Google.

Founded in 2014, the College Park, Maryland-based startup has grown to 24 employees. Some of its early customers in the private sector include General Electric and Orange. Immuta also services public sector clients including the U.S. Government.

It’s a particularly hot time for data governance startups given recent developments with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As time goes on, data will continue to become less and less of a free for all and companies will be expected to ensure data is only put to use for specified purposes. Businesses have an explicit legal interest in ensuring data compliance — something Immuta is more than willing to support.

Users of Immuta can now also take advantage of a virtual Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Layer for distributed batch processing without sacrificing control. Future versions of Immuta will take into account the ever-changing policy and regulatory landscape and offer new features for further automating data governance.