Our Story
Why We Created Habu
Habu is a pioneer and leader in data collaboration technology, founded by industry veterans, Matt Kilmartin and Mike Moreau, along with serial entrepreneurs, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, who previous founded Rapt and and Krux and sold them to Microsoft and Salesforce respectively.
Having a front row seat to the rapidly evolving landscape, the Habu team recognized that in this new world of decentralized data, the game was about bringing applications and intelligence to where data lived, with privacy for consumers and control for businesses.
The beginning
For the last 20 years, Habu’s founding team has been delivering cutting-edge technology to leading enterprises. Habu’s founders first came together at Krux and continued their work together after Salesforce acquired Krux, the leading Data Management Platform (DMP), in 2016. At that time, innovative companies were harnessing DMP to manage data to deliver more personalized to consumers.
The walled gardens – large closed ecosystems – had thorny but navigable hedges around them. Marketers and media companies enjoyed the ability to create all-in-one Systems of Intelligence that captured every scrap of data reflecting the actions, behaviors, affinities, likes, and dislikes of all of their customers. As leading infrastructure for this era, Krux became the fastest growing product at Salesforce in 2017.
New obstacles emerge
In 2018, under the banner of privacy, the walled gardens began to replace their thorny hedges with seven foot-tall, impenetrable steel fences, and the game was forever changed. Marketing data became scarce. Privacy moved from self-regulation to laws like GDPR and CCPA, which carried extreme technical difficulties and steep financial penalties for non-compliance.
The Habu team had a front row seat as all of these tectonic shifts unfolded. We were there on Day 1 with Google in 2017 when they launched their “Clean Room” (now called Ads Data Hub), as a way to protect consumer data but still enable modest collaboration with the advertisers that were funneling billions of dollars into their platform. The other media titans, Facebook and Amazon, followed Google’s lead and built like offerings, called Facebook Advanced Analytics and Amazon Marketing Cloud.
A new way forward
As Habu’s Founders reflected on the future of data collaboration, they saw a durable and very large opportunity. It became clear that a new kind of cloud infrastructure was needed to deliver data-driven marketing in the world of distributed data.
As with all first-gen technology, the data clean room as originally conceived was more of an idea, an attractive yet still incomplete vision.
To make it work, the Habu team committed itself to industrializing and democratizing data clean rooms for every company that was seeking to share data responsibly not just with the titans, but among themselves as well.
Today, we’ve reached the tipping point. Every data-driven company is blitzing to stand up its own clean room environment for privacy-safe data collaboration.
Although this near-term technical imperative is all about distributed data, the business opportunity is far greater: to deliver on data-driven initiatives in a privacy-first era. Meet Habu.
Habu was born
Habu exists to conquer the chaos of distributed data by offering a cohesive, end-to-end, privacy-preserving platform for companies to collaborate responsibly, regardless of each party’s data infrastructure.
Data collaboration is not a new concept to us; however, these changing times require a new approach. Future-proofing data collaboration requires:
- Controlled, auditable, permissioned access of data to via system (including on-prem, cloud, relational, and no-SQL)
- Comprehensive privacy-preserving tooling and automation in the face of ever-changing regulations
- Interoperability to facilitate collaboration within and across all clouds and platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Databricks, and Snowflake, without the need to move data
- Workload flexibility to unlock use cases with BI, ML, AI, and beyond
Habu is the ONLY truly interoperable clean room solution in the market with recent partnership announcements with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Databricks, and Snowflake. Our revolutionary AI-powered data collaboration software is trusted by leading companies across Retail, CPG, Media & Entertainment, and regulated industries, like Financial Services and Healthcare. The most exacting and privacy-focused enterprises trust Habu for their data collaboration needs, including Disney, L’Oreal, PepsiCo, Kroger, LinkedIn, Activision, ASICS, and many more.
In order to meet the demands of the most sophisticated and scaled data collaboration use cases in the world, Habu technology delivers on the combination of flexibility, automation, & governance. Habu has embedded AI throughout the platform to help users discover and implement the art of the possible faster than ever before, with the flexibility to author and implement any use case from BI to ML/AI as standalone queries all the way to multi-step templated use cases.
Where we are today
We couldn’t be happier to announce that Habu has been acquired by LiveRamp to join forces and open new frontiers through enhanced clean room technology. The last 5 years have been an incredible journey for Habu, full of growth, camaraderie, resilience, lessons learned, and shared accomplishments. People are truly what makes a company special and none of this would be possible without our amazing customers, partners, team of Haboosters, and all who have supported us throughout this ride. We couldn’t have done it without you.
We have made tremendous strides over the past 5 years building market-leading technology while having the privilege of working with some of the world’s most innovative companies. We are extremely proud and grateful for the extraordinary customers that have been on this journey with us. As we enter this next phase of our evolution, we are ecstatic that our technology can now be put to work across a far greater network of companies with our shared vision to simplify and scale collaboration for everyone.
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