#3 Pacesetter Awards: OneTrust LLC focuses on privacy

According to Blake Brannon, chief technology officer of OneTrust LLC, privacy awareness has exploded as more people are requesting that companies not use their personal data. This trend has led to increased year-over-year growth of the company, leading OneTrust to be named the No. 1 fastest-growing technology company in Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 2021 Pacesetter Awards, and the third overall fastest-growing company this year.

OneTrust LLC helps organizations operationalize privacy, security, data governance, and ethics and compliance programs. 

“We help organizations manage the privacy and governance of what they do as a company,” Brannon said. “Consumers expect you to be a good, trustworthy company and will say, ‘I will not buy your product if you are not.’ That is the broader driver of having a good platform that can measure your trustworthiness and do it in a way that makes it a competitive edge for you. Every vertical and industry has data, so we run the gamut from very large to very small organizations that need simple compliance processes in place.”  

The five-year-old OneTrust serves over 8,000 clients, including about half of the Fortune 500, Brannon said. They have 13 offices worldwide and employ about 1,500 people, half of which are based out of their Sandy Springs headquarters. 

In December, the company announced a $300 million Series C funding round that completed $710 million in investment over 18 months to build out the OneTrust platform and included new investor TCV, along with existing investors Insight Partners and Coatue.  

“As data creation and collection has exploded, trust and privacy have become increasingly top of mind, and that’s where OneTrust steps in,” said Richard Wells, managing director at Insight Partners. “OneTrust is the most widely used platform helping companies ensure that they are compliant with all laws around privacy, trust and risk. As investors from the beginning, we knew early on that we were partnering with the category leader. As brand trust continues to become critical across all sectors, OneTrust will be remembered as an influential piece of technology for modern business.” 

Brannon said growth during the last year has come from not only an increased focus on enterprise trust by consumers, but from an increasing wave of laws and global privacy regulations. There is also a push by corporations to be more socially responsible. That results in a need to get those messages out to their audiences and a platform to document those actions. 

Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic “forced the world to dive into digital transformation in a quicker way,” Brannon said. “As you become more agile as an organization, you need the technology that helps you operationally put in place better policies that make sure you are trustworthy. The pandemic really fueled the need for organizations to govern these things at a whole new level.” 

Fastest-growing companies, Technology Category