As hackers develop increasingly sophisticated methods of targeting corporate infrastructure, companies must implement new safeguards to protect customer data. Privitar Ltd. is looking to help.

The U.K.-based startup today said it has secured a $16 million investment to widen the adoption of its two privacy enforcement tools. They’re designed to mitigate the risks to which user data and other sensitive records are exposed in a large organization.

Privitar Publisher, the first offering, aims to address the dangers that can emerge when data is moved outside the department to which it belongs. The tool enables users to securely share information by generating a copy that is automatically anonymized upon creation.

Names, credit card numbers and other personally identifiable details are made inaccessible through encryption, while the rest of the dataset is partially distorted using specialized algorithms. The process staves off so-called linkage attacks in which hackers cross-reference seemingly secondary details such as a user’s location with data from other sources to piece together the whole picture.

At the same time, Privitar said, the information scrambled by its algorithms retains the attributes necessary for analysis and other common business uses. The tool has the potential to be particularly useful for organizations that share data with partners, such as hospitals that send clinical trial results to research institutions. But scrambling records only protects against a subset of the privacy risks facing a modern company.

There’s also the matter of preventing compliance breaches by authorized users and attackers who exploit stolen worker credentials, which Privitar tackles with its other offering. Privitar Lens exposes data through a specialized query interface that prevents direct access to the underlying records. Companies can limit what information a given employee or application may view down to specific database columns, while an automated analytics engine keeps an eye out for potential permission abuses.

As part of its growth efforts, Privitar plans to develop yet more privacy features for the two products. The startup will also use a portion of today’s funding to expand sales operations with a particular focus on the U.S. 

Today’s round was led by French fund Partech Ventures with support from Salesforce.com Inc.’s corporate investment arm and CME Ventures, a subsidiary of derivatives exchange operator CME Group Inc. Privitar has raised over $21 million to date.

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