About Blind Insight
Blind Insight builds the encryption-in-use platform so AI and analytics can run on sensitive data without ever exposing it.
The trade-off we don’t think is real
Most approaches to sensitive data start from the same trade-off: expose it and get the value, or lock it away and lose the value. Every version of that catch-22 — mobilize the data and risk a breach, protect it and sacrifice what it’s for — comes from the same place. It isn’t a law of data. It’s what happens when the tools available can’t compute on data without decrypting it first.
Blind Insight runs AI models, analytics, and queries directly against encrypted data. A fraud model trained on encrypted records — using the training algorithms we support — shows a 0.0 F1 delta against the same model trained on plaintext, verified on 600,000 records. A query against an encrypted dataset returns the same answer as one against a cleartext copy. What’s different is what never happens along the way: nobody decrypts the data to get there. Not the model. Not our infrastructure. Not us. Keys stay with whoever holds the seed that derives them, and that’s never Blind Insight.
Why we built this
We started the company because that trade-off has a cost measured in more than compliance fines. As our founder put it when Blind Insight joined the ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub: “Healthcare needs data. Mobilizing data for research, innovation, and operational efficiency will lead to lower costs and improved outcomes for millions.” The same holds outside healthcare — in fraud detection, in financial services, in every place someone’s records sit locked away because nobody built the infrastructure to use them safely instead.
Founders
Making encrypted analytics practical at enterprise scale is a cryptography problem. Getting a regulated enterprise to trust it is a people problem. Between them, the founders have spent their careers on both.
- Shipped software for regulated industries — pharma at Boehringer Ingelheim, payments at PayPal, insurance at The Hartford, privacy at Orchid — for twenty-plus years, and watched project after project blocked the moment it needed real customer data.
- Started Blind Insight to remove that blocker.
- Zero-to-one product and technology leader with multiple exits; has run product, go-to-market, and the deals themselves.
- As Cloudflare's Head of Research, ran the cryptography protecting roughly a third of all internet traffic.
- Led iTunes DRM at Apple. Contributor to TLS 1.3, Encrypted Client Hello, and Privacy Pass.
- Internet Architecture Board member, IRTF Crypto Forum Research Group co-chair, Real World Crypto steering committee. Merriam-Webster's example sentence for cryptographer.
Between the founders and the wider team: six companies founded, 36 patents, six acquisitions, two IPOs.
Blind Insight is backed by Sequoia, 500 Startups, X Factor Ventures, and Altari Ventures. We were named one of Integra Groupe’s top women-led startups, and we’re a spoke in the ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub network working to accelerate health innovation nationwide.
Reach us
We’re headquartered in Venice, CA, and mostly async.
We’d like to hear from you. Get in touch, or if hard cryptography problems and a beginner’s mind sound like your kind of week, see how we work.
Sensitive data shouldn’t have to choose between useful and protected. We’re building the layer that makes the choice unnecessary.