Cozy Cloud: a 4 million euro funding round to support its growth. The startup accelerates its development with MAIF and Innovacom
Paris, 10 June 2016. The startup Cozy Cloud completes a second funding round of 4 million euros from MAIF (through its investment fund MAIF Avenir) and Innovacom to accelerate its commercial growth and support the digital transformation of large groups by offering a new paradigm for personal data and customer relations.
Personal data: a major issue
Faced with the threat of disintermediation by the digital giants, and in order to meet their customers' new expectations,
large groups are engaging in a complex digital transition one of whose major issues is without
doubt access to data. The digital giants have that access in abundance, to the point that they
have entered their users' digital intimacy. Users end up giving up control of
their personal data, so dependent are they on those services to make daily life easier.
It is a paradoxical situation, partly addressed by recent developments in law (data
portability in the French Lemaire law and in the European "Payment Services Directive 2"), but above all by
the emergence of a "self data" movement that Cozy has led for years, and which aims to organise
the reclaiming by individuals of their personal data, today scattered among various
competing players and held captive by those organisations.
Giving power back to the user: Cozy Cloud's leitmotiv
Founded in 2012, Cozy Cloud set itself the goal not only of giving individuals back control of
their personal data, but also of offering large groups the opportunity to build a rich and virtuous
customer relationship by placing the customer space with… the customer!
In practical terms, Cozy Cloud offers an easy-to-use personal cloud solution, a decentralised open-source
platform hosted on a server belonging to the individual, at home or with a trusted third party (Gandi, OVH).
Through connectors that import data from various online services, this server
is designed to aggregate all of a person's personal data (email, calendar, files, data from third parties
such as bank accounts and detailed bills, or from the internet of things) within an unprecedented,
cross-cutting data pool that an ecosystem of services and applications can draw on, on the model of an iOS or Android
marketplace. This "trustworthy by design" technology unlocks for the individual the potential to
create value from that combined data, in a logic of empowerment.
4M€: to accelerate Cozy's growth and support large groups
Thanks to this funding round, Cozy will accelerate its commercial efforts to bring large groups to
deploy their customer applications within this marketplace and to distribute its solution by making it
available to their customers.
What is in it for those organisations: a digital intimacy greater than the GAFAs', thanks to access to
the full sets of cross-cutting data present exclusively in this environment, within which they
can distribute innovative services "blind" without the data ever leaving. Tomorrow, thanks to Cozy,
the individual hosts all of their personal data themselves, under their own control, and reaches
"augmented" customer applications through a single, secure and simple environment. A win-win
system, transparent and generating trust.
Trust at the heart of the MAIF and Cozy Cloud strategic partnership
For Pascal Demurger, managing director of MAIF: "At MAIF, we are proud to support the growth
of Cozy Cloud and to begin with it a new paradigm around self data. As a company that is a reference
in customer relations, MAIF is convinced of Cozy's capacity to disrupt the sensitive subject of
personal data by opening the way to a digital customer relationship based on trust, the pillar of our
community. That is the meaning of this strategic and financial partnership, a structuring building block in our
digital transformation strategy."
Benjamin ANDRÉ, CEO of Cozy Cloud, for his part welcomes having found in MAIF a solid partner whose
investment is part of a long-term digital strategy: "Beyond sharing a vision
on the need to put trust and people back at the centre of digital, MAIF is a valuable ally for
bringing together a number of sizeable players around self data, by being a pioneer of the approach."
Jérôme Faul, managing director of Innovacom, an existing investor, continues: "We are delighted to
continue the Cozy Cloud adventure alongside a major insurance player, which legitimises both the approach and
the products that restore users' confidence in the way their data is stored,
managed and used, in full transparency and under their control."