PKWARE

Established mid-market data security vendor with legacy compression heritage, competing in the growing data discovery and protection space against larger cybersecurity platforms.

PKWARE is a Milwaukee-based data security company with a long history rooted in the creation of the ZIP file format and compression technology. Over decades, the company evolved from a compression software vendor into a comprehensive data security platform provider, focusing on discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. Its flagship platform, Smartcrypt, enables organizations to automatically discover and encrypt sensitive data wherever it resides. In November 2020, PKWARE acquired Dataguise, a data discovery and masking company, significantly expanding its capabilities in sensitive data intelligence, particularly for big data environments like Hadoop and cloud data lakes. This acquisition strengthened PKWARE's position in the data privacy and compliance space, adding data masking and de-identification capabilities to its portfolio. While PKWARE is not a traditional AdTech company, it is relevant to the ecosystem as a data security and privacy infrastructure provider. Organizations in advertising technology rely on PKWARE-style solutions to manage compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations that directly govern how consumer data used in ad targeting and measurement must be handled, stored, and protected.