Tune Insight: Meet the Venture Leader Technology orchestrating secure data collaboration

05.04.2023 07:00, Morgane Ghilardi

Meet Juan Troncoso-Pastoriza, co-founder and CEO of Tune Insight. In our data-centric economy, his startup orchestrates secure collaborations on sensitive data across companies, domains, or jurisdictions, enabling collective analytics, federated machine learning, and other approved computations while protecting data in use and streamlining compliance. Juan will join nine other tech innovators on the Venture Leaders investor and business development roadshow in Silicon Valley.

Name: Juan Ramon Troncoso-Pastoriza
Location: Lausanne, Switzerland 
Nationality: Spanish
Education: PhD from the University of Vigo, 2012
Job title: CEO and co-founder 
Number of employees: 9 
Money raised: ~CHF 1 million 
First touchpoint with Venturelab: Venture Kick, 2021-2022

Whom does your product or solution help, and how? 
Today's organizations are heavily data-centric when required to make decisions. Most of them realize that their own data is not enough and decide to collaborate on confidential data with others to improve their insights. But such collaboration is prevented when it comes to sensitive or confidential data due to the risk of data leaks or because of data-privacy concerns and regulations. 

We address confidentiality and regulatory constraints that impair collaborative data analysis in a fully decentralized way, without having to resort to any trusted third party. This includes companies in health and pharma (multi-site analyses and value-based healthcare), insurance and finance (fraud detection and anti-money-laundry), and managed security service providers (collective cyber resilience). The same applies to data valorization.

How did you come up with the idea for your startup? 
I have been working in the field of applied cryptography, privacy protection, and information security since 2005, and it was clear since the beginning that this technology had a huge potential to help organizations progress and offer their products and services while protecting citizens' rights to privacy as well as the confidentiality of business information.

After 15 years of work, the technology we have been working on is now mature, and the market is ready to adopt it; we're in the right place at the right time to successfully leverage the opportunity to have an immense impact in the industry.

What market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup in that market?
We address companies in the enterprise data and analytics market, with strong ties to the machine-learning, confidential computing, and homomorphic encryption markets. The market is immense because we foresee a future where collective data computation will happen by default over decentralized and encrypted data in the same way that data transmitted over the internet today is almost always encrypted.
 

---

---

How do you think the Venture Leaders roadshow will help you achieve your vision? 
Our current customer base is eminently Swiss and European. But we have just started raising seed funds, which will let us double our revenue figures in 2023 and continue doubling them yearly. This implies expanding our customer networks and our product deployments beyond Switzerland; in particular, we are targeting cybersecurity, health, and insurance companies in the EU and the US. Participation in the program will significantly accelerate the implementation of our current internationalization strategy and strengthen our opportunities to successfully penetrate the US market.

What excites you most about your work right now?
Our solution features a unique combination of cryptographic techniques, called multiparty homomorphic encryption, that represents the culmination of years of research and development. It enables analysis algorithms to run on distributed data without transferring it and keeps all intermediate results encrypted with post-quantum protection. We achieve better scalability, accuracy, and performance than existing software cryptographic technologies, as well as higher flexibility and lower deployment and maintenance costs than hardware-based confidential computing approaches. 

Seeing this technology adopted and used by our customers, helping them break the traditional data collaboration risks is really exciting, especially when customers use us to solve important problems, like collectively fighting against fraud in financial services, or accessing better training data for dermatology or personalized oncology.

How did you go about building your team? 
The four co-founders have complementary backgrounds, including privacy, cryptography, software development, business development, and prior startup experience. We immediately started working together to bring our vision to reality and quickly brought together a team of talented developers, between prior EPFL students with high potential who worked with us in the past, and new hires with prior experience in the industry, all of them together bringing the skills we needed to quickly implement, industrialize, and deploy our solutions.

We have now 10 employees, including interns and master students from EPFL and ETH who represent an incomparable talent pool. In the next couple of years, we plan to complement the team by doubling our development and machine learning workforce and a sales and business development team to replicate the sales model that we are currently consolidating in health, financial services, and cybersecurity.

What are your team's key achievements to date? 
We have already deployed full-stack solutions in operational settings with real data in the health vertical, with two flagship deployments across Swiss hospitals. We have more active projects in cybersecurity (armasuisse and several Manage Security Service Providers) and health (pharma and medical software companies). We built multiple connectors and APIs to facilitate integration with cloud frameworks in multiple domains, and we are currently negotiating license agreements in cybersecurity and health.

How did you come up with the name of your startup? 
This was a difficult process; we brainstormed among the co-founders and also with branding experts to find a short and catchy name that could convey the essence of our work and the value our solutions bring to our customers. 

We worked with multiple analogies and metaphors that could work, but we quickly converged to the musical analogy. Tune Insight represents the synchronicity of an orchestra, bringing all instruments playing together to compose a joint and harmonious melody, where the audience does not hear anymore the individual instruments (representing the individual confidential or personal data), but the collective tune (the actionable global insights), that gives back to them what they need. This idea immediately won us over.

What is the most rewarding aspect of being a founder?
Being a founder offers me the possibility to make the right decisions to bring many years of research and development to the service of our customers' needs. It represents being able to translate what previously were complex ideas and abstract concepts into tangible products that solve real-world problems. 

It's also immensely rewarding to see the industry realize the impact this technology has always and to contribute to the fast pace at which the health and cybersecurity industries need to progress in a way that is compatible with citizens' privacy rights.

Tune Insight's co-founders: Juan Troncoso Pastoriza (CEO), Romain Bouyé (Head of Software), Frederic Pont (COO), and Jean-Pierre Hubaux

What is the most important lesson you have learned as a founder?
There are two takeaways I'd highlight: with great power comes great responsibility, and never stop moving. Founding a startup gives you enormous flexibility to decide where you want to move next and which key targets you want to tackle to advance to the next level. The speed and momentum at which a startup flies are really disrupting when compared to how regular established companies operate.

Founders have the responsibility to keep this pace, to work beyond their 100% to make their vision a reality, to be able to bridge the gap between technology and sales, to identify the paths leading to product-market-fit, and also to bring the (initially small) team in sync to be able to quickly steer the ship to always head in the right direction.

What are you known for among your friends and family?
I think I'm known to be quite competitive and tenacious, even when some of my friends insist on qualifying it as stubbornness. Whenever I set myself a goal I do everything in my power and beyond to reach it, and I never stop until I get it. Also, I'm programmed to do my best to try to win any game I play, which sometimes has the unwanted effect of transforming every activity into a competition.

What are you most proud of?
I could never sufficiently express how proud I am of my family and the support they have always given me to realize my dreams and my ambitions. They taught me the values and principles of responsibility, hard work, fairness, humility, honesty, and loyalty that allow me to be who I am today. They supported me at every step of my early studies to try to always be the best; I was the first of my school up to the A levels, I ranked first in my Master's degree in the whole country, I won several prizes for my doctoral thesis, and I expect that this startup will let me collect many more successes for me and for my team.
 

---

ABOUT THE PROGRAM
The Venture Leaders Technology 2023 were chosen from over 150 applications by a jury of investors and technology experts. The roadshow in Silicon Valley, one of the world's most important tech hubs, provides a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to accelerate their startups' expansion in the US while expanding their professional network and profiting from workshops with investors and industry leaders. This year's Venture Leaders Technology is co-organized by Venturelab and supported by Canton of Vaud, Canton of Zürich, EPFL, ETH Zürich, Kellerhals Carrard, and Rothschild & Co.
 

---