The numbers don’t lie: a medium-sized business can produce more than 10 million files through their users and employees, approximately 25% of which contains sensitive data. Data classification poses an urgent challenge in the cybersecurity space, especially considering that more than 80% of the data that a company handles is unstructured through their employees' work — and that the average total cost of a data breach in most industries is upwards of $4.88M.

Fortunately, Miami-based startup Kriptos is on a mission to empower organizations and protect sensitive data with their AI-powered software. Kriptos’ AI-powered document analysis software automatically analyzes, classifies and labels documents to prevent data leakage, strengthen cybersecurity strategies and achieve regulatory compliance.

“Businesses have billions of documents spread everywhere, so one of our main goals is to customize our AI algorithm, according to the internal policies of classification, to help our clients process and classify all that data to enhance their security posture,” says COO and cofounder Alfonso Villalba.

Protecting companies from data breaches that compromise sensitive data

Alfonso and his cofounder and CEO Christian Torres built the startup in an attempt to address the pressing concerns around data leakage.

“Our vision from the beginning has been to design unique technology that, through a fully customizable process, can guarantee our customers a high level of accuracy in discovering, classifying, and labeling their documents to protect sensitive data,” Torres said of the startup’s origins.

“Without knowing what is sensitive, it's difficult to protect information, prevent data leakage, comply with PII regulations, or understand the risk each employee represents based on their access to sensitive information,” he added.

Coupled with slow and expensive human classification or manual technologies, the Kriptos team knew there was a better way to help businesses prevent data leakage using AI.

Outsourcing documentation classification to a consultancy can take several years to complete and amounts to $109k in staffing costs. However, the Kriptos AI technology has the capacity to automatically analyze, classify, and label millions of files in days or weeks at no extra cost, providing their customers with full data visibility in a short time.

“Identifying sensitive information is not something humans can achieve alone and it is important to note that threats are not only external but also internal. Our primary focus at Kriptos is to provide insights and data to our customers to combat insider threats, allowing them to see which employees have access to sensitive information, determine if their access is appropriate, or identify if they should not have access at all,” says Christian.

The Kriptos infrastructure relies on a Google tech stack to help the startup continue to innovate and scale.

“We have been using several APIs from Google Workspace, as one of our main products performs data discovery and data classification in Google Drive and Shared Drive. We also started using Google's native data classification labels so we can provide our current Google Workspace customers with a more native solution using our AI models. This allows us to label millions of files using this new feature from Google Data Loss Prevention,” says Torres.

As 2023 recipients of the Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund, Kriptos received hands-on support to help improve their current internal processes in sales, marketing, product development, and other aspects through frameworks, methodologies, and various tools. In 2024, the team double-downed on their partnership with Google via the Growth Academy: AI for Cybersecurity program to work alongside cyber experts around the world.

“This program has been a unique experience for us, as we had the opportunity to learn from mentors and advisors with extensive experience in this industry. Learning from amazing Google professionals about their vision for cybersecurity's future, their current processes, and seeing how they build worldwide products in this field has been a valuable experience, providing important lessons to implement at Kriptos. One of our most memorable moments in the program was hearing Heather Adkins talk about how Google is implementing AI to improve their products and developing new solutions to tackle cybersecurity problems in the world. It was very inspiring for us, and I will always remember it as a special moment that this program gave us,” Torres recalls.

Celebrating major milestones in risk prevention

Today, Kriptos has experienced twice as much revenue growth, with ambitious plans to expand into the US and Spanish markets. They have customers in more than 10 countries across the US and LATAM, and have classified more than 700 million files for their customers. They are also working on a product roadmap development with a focus on data (NLP tech) analytics and AI.

Notable milestones include helping Aguas Andinas achieve ISO 27001 Compliance and adapting to Law 21459 in Chile. They also helped Banco Solidario comply with 85% of regulations, allowing them to concentrate efforts on other strategies and risks.

Now in their aggressive growth phase, Kriptos plans to “grow 10x in the next five years in terms of customers, revenue, and product impact” and is planning a new investment round in the coming months to invest in various resources and projects that will enable the team to scale.

The founders have a clear vision to protect businesses whilst contributing to the evolution of cybersecurity and AI for the benefit of humanity.

“Through our technology, we enhance secure and ethical AI adoption among our customers. Our impact is felt within the cybersecurity and compliance teams of each customer, enabling them to improve their data protection and compliance strategies. Additionally, by helping them discover a wide range of personal data, we allow them to protect the personal data of millions of people more efficiently.”