The Australian data exchange startup Data Republic Pty. Ltd. has raised $10.5 million from the venture arms of two banks and an airline, the Sydney-based company announced today.

Qantas Airways Ltd.’s Qantas Loyalty fund, the National Australia Bank’s NAB Ventures and Westpac Banking Corp.’s ReInventure Fund, managed by Data Republic cofounder Danny Gilligan, are participating in the two-year-old company’s Series A round. To date Data Republic had raised a little under $2 million from Australian investors, including Westpac.

The money will be used to expand the company’s technology base, including application programming interfaces and a software development kit. It also will be used to open a U.S. outpost in the San Francisco Bay Area, headed by Chief Technology Officer Ryan Peterson, cofounder and Chief Executive Officer Paul McCarney (pictured above) said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. Peterson is former chief solutions strategist for the emerging technologies division of EMC, which has agreed to merge with Dell in a $67 billion deal.

Data Republic has created a technology platform that allows companies, governments and other organizations to share data in a secure way via an exchange. Along with Westpac, the company developed what it calls the first data banking service. It allows companies such as banks and wireless carriers, which have obtained permission from customers, to sell data to companies that want to get a fuller picture of their customers’ activities for ad targeting and other purposes.

Such deals have been done one-on-one for years. Data Republic aims to bring more rigorous bank-grade security and a governance system designed with the law firm Allens, including making sure customers have agreed to use of data on their purchasing and other activities and protecting personal information via tokenization.

Using Data Republic’s platform, for instance, a bank might be able to get access to your flight information so it knows when you’re traveling overseas and can avoid cancelling the credit card it might otherwise suspect of being stolen. Or the data could be used by retailers to better target customers with personalized ads or offers. The use of such data varies widely by country, so the data platform would aim to make sure data is exchanged under each country’s respective laws.

For now, Data Republic is taking a cut based on the amount of data getting exchanged, but McCarney said that if and when it builds enough volume of data, the company will take a cut of what data buyers pay to access data on the exchange.

Peterson visited theCUBE (owned by the same parent company as SiliconANGLE) at the BigDataSV event in San Jose in March, explaining more about how the company aims to create a data marketplace:

Photo from Data Republic