Kabir Barday – Cookie Monster

Kabir Barday, founder of OneTrust, is a first-generation American entrepreneur— and was early to realize that online privacy laws are creating a massive new market.

- By Tom Foster

Kabir Barday

OneTrust

THREE-YEAR GROWTH 48,337.2%

“There’s a lot that goes on behind the cookie banner,” says Kabir Barday, the founder and CEO of OneTrust. He’s talking about that now-ubiquitous pop-up on websites that lets you know the site is collecting data on your visits and activity in order to personalize your experience—or sell your information to third parties. The cookie banner is perhaps the most visibly identifiable sign of his company’s software, but the real work is the invisible machinery churning away behind that banner.

Atlanta-based OneTrust, which landed at No. 1 on this year’s Inc. 500, with more than $70 million in 2019 revenue and a staggering 48,337.2 percent three-year growth rate, is among the global leaders in privacy-law-compliance technology. In the most straightforward terms, OneTrust builds a suite of digital tools that gives companies a clearer view of all the user data they accumulate. This enables them to comply with privacy laws, like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that give consumers greater control of how and whether companies use their data.

Before lawmakers began to take notice of consumer complaints about data misuse, most companies simply didn’t have dedicated technology for managing their users’ privacy. Now they must. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect in January, is another of what are expected to be many more laws related to user privacy. The cost of noncompliance is increasing dramatically.