Ross Mason Single Family Office Invests In Apheris €2.5M Funding Round

Apheris, a deep tech company from Berlin, Germany, has raised €2.5M in an investment round. One of the investors is Dig Ventures, the UK single family office of Mule Soft founder Ross Mason.

Building a data privacy ecosystem for data scientists

Apheris is working on fundamental technology for privacy-preserving data access. The Berlin-based startup has a strong research focus: 60% of the employees have a technical PhD who produced more than 65 publications. The main product of apheris is a platform that enables data sharing, while upholding privcay of the users. The startup’s privacy engine is based on federated machine learning and state-of-the-art crytopgraphy. Through Apheris solution, data scientists can access third-party private data for their machine learning models, without compromising the used data. Some underlying technologies of the company’s solution are multiparty computation, differential privacy, record linkage and homomorphic encryption. The company was launched by Robin Röhm and Michael Höh in January 2019, the product was released in September 2019.

Ross Mason Single Family Office invests in Apheris

Now, the tech company raised €2.5M for its further growth. The round was led by seed investor LocalGlobe. Other investors include Patrick Pichette (former Google CFO) and Dig Ventures, the single family office of Ross Mason. Ross Mason founded MuleSoft in 2006, a software company working on SaaS integration solutions. The company filed for an IPO in 2017 and was acquired in 2018 by Salesforce for €6.5BN. Through his family office Dig Ventures, Mason invests in Pre-Seed and Seed-Stage B2B SaaS companies. Mason comments the investment in the Berlin startup with: “Enterprises are sitting on treasure troves of data that cannot be leveraged because it’s been an impossible task to open up data to third-party companies without losing data or diminishing its value.” Other portfolio companies of Mason’s single family office include Comply Advantage, Rasa or people.ai. Dig Ventures’ most succesful exit was ride hailing company Lyft.