From ensuring compliance with global regulations to providing continuous inventory discovery and classification powered by seamless integrations, Mine is at the forefront of making data privacy intuitive. Mine's data governance and privacy platform, MineOS, enables organizations to discover data quickly, act on relevant risks, manage data requests and customer consent, prevent breaches, and ensure compliance stays effortless. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Mine co-founder and CEO Gal Ringel to learn more about the company.

Gal Ringel's Background

Thank you for participating in our interview series, Gal. Can you tell me about your background?

"My background is in cybersecurity and venture capital. I spent six years in the IDF as part of the 8200 Elite Intelligence Corps, and then from there, I moved onto the world of venture capital, where I helped lead over $50 million in investment. I started Mine after those experiences and am the CEO of the company."

"Me and a few good friends of mine, Gal Golan and Kobi Nissan, were looking around in the wake of the EU's GDPR law passing, and we all realized just how much people needed privacy solutions. The GDPR gives people data rights and the ability to reclaim their digital footprint, but so few actually knew they had those rights or how to exercise them that we felt we could build a solution to help them. Then, as companies began receiving those data subject requests (DSR), they came to us because they were unsure how to handle them, which spawned Mine's B2B product, MineOS."

"The core modules of the MineOS platform are solutions for data mapping, data subject request handling, and most recently AI asset discovery and risk assessment. Our data subject request handling helps automate the process of finding and deleting data upon individual requests, which saves companies hours and hours or effort. Our data mapping tool covers data discovery and classification continuously and comprehensively, because any organization needs an incredibly strong baseline of what data they actually have before they can approach data governance and compliance. And similarly, the newest module for AI governance takes the same approach to identify which data systems are using AI, which brings a practical element to managing and overseeing AI."

Evolution Of Mine's Technology

How has your technology evolved since launching?

"The team, particularly in engineering, has grown so much since the company started, that we're able to do so much more for companies now. The core systems for compliance were always in place, but our DSR handling is far smoother as we've added more integrations to the platform, and the overall experience is much more customizable, which lets companies tailor the power of automation more to their specific use cases."

Significant Milestones

What have been some of Mine's most significant milestones?

"Releasing our AI Asset Discovery and Risk Assessment module was a real watermark for us. We talk to hundreds of people in the privacy and security industry every week, and AI has so many people worried about new and heightened challenges to data governance. To be able to leverage our platform's strengths of data visibility and risk identification and extend that to tackle this major new aspect affecting our world is a testament to the entire team's work and how far the MineOS platform has come."

Challenges Faced

What are some challenges you and your team have faced in the industry since starting Mine?

"This is something we hear from privacy professionals regularly, but convincing the organization of the value and ROI of privacy is not an easy task. A lot of the heavy-hitting regulations have only been around a few years and many companies are used to handling user data pretty laxly. Getting many to do a major turn on how they approach data protection and why privacy tech is the right investment for them is something our champions really need to sway leadership on."

Customer Success Stories

Can you share some of Mine's customer success stories?

"A big part of what makes MineOS unique is our multi-pronged approach to data discovery and classification. Traditionally data mapping is a very manual and laborious task, and it often fails to detect a good percentage of data systems within an organization anyway. One of our customers, Ledgy, ran their initial data map with MineOS and discovered more than 50 shadow IT data systems that were in the organization - yet, were unaware of this. That's the norm for almost every organization that runs a data map with MineOS, which is why data mapping tools are so important now."

"Our data mapping is unmatched. Most data protection companies will offer SSO, cloud, and website scans to detect data systems, but we offer an email scan via our email navigator on top of those options, which is how we manage to get a more comprehensive data map than other solutions. When you get down to it, the bottom line of any data privacy regulation is visibility and accountability, so having as much info as possible on the data in your organization is always the starting point for a good data governance program."

"We've onboarded several enterprise clients over the past year, but as MineOS has matured and continues to mature, being able to power the privacy programs of more and more enterprises globally is a big goal for us. The bigger the company, the bigger the challenge around data governance, and we're ready to help tackle that."

Lesson Learned As An Entrepreneur

What has been the biggest lesson you've learned as an entrepreneur building Mine?

"Surround yourself with great people. Don't just hire for talent, but for fit and to get good people on board. If you gather genuinely nice, passionate people, you're going to do great things and be easy to deal with, and those things go far when paired together."