Raito

Main service(s)

Raito is a product company. It provides a platform that lets you monitor, manage, and automate multi-cloud data security.

The importance of data to the modern organisation is beyond question. We use it to uncover insights, trends, issues, performance and so much more. Data is obviously too important to restrict access outright. But, giving everyone access to all data isn’t the right idea either. This raises the question: How do I give the right people access to the right data in a timely manner?

This is exactly the problem Raito is looking to solve. There are a couple of components to the solution:

• Give data owners the tools to directly manage access to data without having to take a detour to the (usually already overloaded) IAM team. This includes simplification and automation of approval processes and keeping access in sync with the actual organisational structure.
• Provide fine-grained controls to manage data access: instead of giving access to the whole data catalogue, filter or mask data based on various configurable conditions (ie: column masking, row filtering).
• Deep integration with the data development processes, allowing data engineers and analysts to use familiar tooling to integrate data security. This lowers the adoption hurdle, which results in security built in from the beginning (shift left).

These components allow organisations to give access to data responsibly, lower the administrative burden and lower time wasted waiting for access.

Raito currently targets mid-sized organisations (between 1000 and 10000 employees) for which data is a strategic asset: as these organisations use data extensively to bring new products to market (before the competition), one can easily see the value of having secure access to the necessary data.

Finally there is the idea of enriching general AI/LLM’s with company specific data, to allow companies to deploy copilots, bots or other AI agents. Here, the question is: what data can we send to the LLM, and trust it will not leak it? For now, the answer is that we have to be very careful, as LLM’s have shown themselves to be very unpredictable and prone to leaking data. For now, the best way to avoid future embarrassment, is to avoid sending sensitive data to the LLM. Of course, this is another important use case for Raito.

Differentiators

Pragmatic approach

The Raito approach is pragmatic and focused on delivering value quickly (as opposed to a top-down, policy driven approach).

The product aims to quickly provide insight. Teams can start from there and mature access controls at their own pace. There is a “policy recommender” feature, which helps maturity by recommending next steps.

Integration in data team tooling

Raito integrates with the data team CI/CD pipeline. This allows organisations to manage access-as-code (which is familiar to the data team members, as they use similar processes for other aspects). Access-as-code in turn enables automation of data governance in the data product development process.

Future plans

Now that Raito has successfully launched their solution, they are focusing on incorporating feedback from existing customers and adding new customers.

For 2024, the main product focus is on further integration in the workflows of the data engineers and data analysts.

Company history

Raito was founded in 2021 by Bart Vandekerckhove and Dieter Wachters. At the time, they were both working at Collibra.

Bart and Dieter noticed companies were struggling with data access and operationalisation of data governance policies, so they decided to build a company to solve those problems.

In October 2022, Raito raised €4 million in seed funding from Dawn Capital, Crane Venture and angels from Collibra, Showpad and Harbr.

In 2023, Raito launched its first MVP and immediately onboarded its first customers.

Currently, Raito has a linkedin headcount of 15.