Cortado Ventures Closes Investment With PrivacyBrain

Cortado Ventures is pleased to announce it has funded PrivacyBrain, an Oklahoma-based security and privacy software company for scrubbing employees’ personal identifying information from the internet to avoid corporate cyber attacks. The Seed investment will equip PrivacyBrain to scale its product and service offerings to additional pilot clients and accommodate growing demand for enterprise customers. The Seed round was led by i2E and included a number of Oklahoma-based angel investors, making this a prime example of Oklahoma funders working together to back innovative Oklahoma startups.

The Cortado Ventures fund is managed by partners Nathaniel Harding, David Woods, and Mike Moradi. The fund invests in early stage companies in a variety of Oklahoma regional sectors by aggregating and managing investor capital, and helps startups grow through seed funding, collaboration, and mentorship. The Cortado partners have launched the venture capital fund to build next generation companies which will bring future-ready technology jobs to the region.

Nathaniel Harding, Managing Partner of Cortado Ventures, said, “We are eager to partner with PrivacyBrain to provide a solution to the threat businesses face daily, especially during the greatest influx of employees moving to remote work settings on record. We are thrilled to be part of such an Oklahoma-centric funding round and plan to continue investing in Oklahoma’s brightest entrepreneurs alongside other local startup investors.”

PrivacyBrain is designed to help businesses avoid cyber attacks and phishing campaigns caused by employees’ publicly available personal identifying information, or PII. When an employee’s personal cell phone number or other easily accessible information is collected by attackers, it opens their employers up to data breaches, IP theft, or other cyber security incidents. PrivacyBrain addresses this problem at the root by identifying the presence of employees’ online information and automating removal requests on their behalf. PrivacyBrain currently outperforms many other providers in terms of the volume of sites scrubbed for PII leaks, cost per employee, reporting capability, and volume of scans performed annually per user.

“If you Google someone, you’ll see that many broker websites advertise having this information, and it’s easy to access,” PrivacyBrain founder Elliott Adams said. “Our technology works to help our clients understand where the information is, helps them remove the information, and monitors whether or not the information returns. If it does come back, we start the removal process over again. This funding round is especially important to us as we want to dedicate more resources to improving the user experience for our clients and building a product that our clients love using.”

Founder Elliott Adams brings a myriad of experience to his role at PrivacyBrain; Adams has a track record as a technology startup leader, with a successful 2008 exit from music distributor CD Baby, as well as respected influence as a thought leader in various capacities for several accelerators and entrepreneurship institutions such as Techstars, South by Southwest, Stanford, and University of California, Berkeley. Cortado Ventures will support PrivacyBrain as it expands and prepares for pilots and then full launch, enabling strategic partnerships for the company’s growth and quickly scaling the company with channel partners.

Cortado Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm investing in ambitious, growth-driven companies to define a new generation of economic prosperity for Oklahoma and the immediate region.