This Startup Just Raised $375 Million Because Your Personal Data Is Already Everywhere

If you have ever signed up for a newsletter, ordered food online, or created any account on any website, your name, phone number, email address, and home address are almost certainly for sale. Data brokers aggregate this information from public records, loyalty programs, app permissions, and breach databases, then sell it to anyone willing to pay. Advertisers buy it. Scammers buy it. And increasingly, AI systems use it to generate hyper personalized phishing attacks.

Cloaked, a privacy startup founded by brothers Arjun and Abhijay Bhatnagar in 2020, just raised $375 million to build the opposite of that system. Instead of exposing your real data, Cloaked generates disposable identities for every service you use. If any of those services gets breached, attackers get an alias, not you.

Your Email Address Is the Master Key

Of all the personal data that brokers sell, your email address is the most valuable. It is the primary identifier that links your accounts across platforms. It is the delivery mechanism for phishing attacks. And it is the first thing attackers look for in breach databases to launch credential stuffing campaigns.

There are over 4,000 data broker companies operating globally, collecting information from public records, social media, purchase histories, and app usage. A single person's data profile can contain hundreds of data points: your employer, estimated income, political affiliation, health conditions, and daily commute. This information feeds a $400 billion advertising industry, but it also feeds a fraud ecosystem that starts with your email inbox.

What Cloaked Actually Does

Cloaked operates on three levels. First, it generates virtual identities. When you sign up for a website, Cloaked creates a unique email address, phone number, and password for that specific service. Messages and calls still reach you through the Cloaked app, but the company behind the website never sees your real contact information. If that company later suffers a breach, the exposed data is worthless because it leads back to a disposable alias, not to your actual identity.

Second, Cloaked removes your existing data from the internet. The platform monitors over 130 data broker and people search sites, submitting removal requests on your behalf and rechecking to make sure your information stays deleted. The company says it has removed more than one billion records from broker databases so far.

Third, Cloaked blocks scam calls in real time using an AI powered system called Call Guard. It analyzes incoming calls for patterns associated with fraud, including robocall signatures, spoofed numbers, and voice synthesis markers, and blocks them before they reach you.

The Numbers Behind the Raise

The $375 million round was led by General Catalyst and Liberty City Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital, DuckDuckGo, LG Technology Ventures, and the NFL Players Association. The company has grown tenfold over the past year and now serves more than 350,000 paying customers. It has protected over 10 million identities.

DuckDuckGo's participation is notable. The privacy focused search engine rarely invests in other companies, and its backing signals that Cloaked's approach aligns with a broader privacy technology movement that has grown from niche advocacy into a mainstream market.

Why Enterprises Are Paying Attention

The new funding will fuel Cloaked's expansion into enterprise security. The company is building tools that give employees the same identity protection it offers consumers: masked credentials, password management, and automated data removal, managed through a corporate dashboard.

This addresses a growing attack surface. Employees reuse personal email addresses for work accounts, store credentials in browsers, and expose company systems when their personal data appears in breach databases. A phishing email is more convincing when it references a real person's name, role, and employer. Cloaked's enterprise product severs that connection by keeping employee identities separate from corporate access.

What This Means for Privacy

Cloaked's raise reflects a shift in how the market thinks about privacy. For years, privacy tools were reactive: VPNs hid your IP address after you connected, breach monitors notified you after your data was stolen, and password managers secured credentials you had already created. Cloaked's model is proactive. It prevents your real data from entering circulation in the first place.

The $375 million figure also signals investor confidence that privacy is not a feature but a category. The company joins a growing market that includes DeleteMe for data broker removal, 1Password for credential management, and Signal for encrypted messaging. But Cloaked is the first to bundle identity generation, data removal, and AI call screening into a single platform at this scale.

Whether it delivers on that promise remains to be seen. Some users have reported mixed results with data broker removal, and the platform's effectiveness depends on how aggressively brokers recollect data after removal requests. But the underlying bet, that disposable identities are the future of online privacy, is one that $375 million says the market believes.

What You Can Do Now

You do not need to wait for a single platform to protect your data. Start by searching your name on people search sites like Spokeo, WhitePages, and BeenVerified. If your information appears, most sites have opt out forms you can submit yourself. Use unique email addresses for different services. Apple's Hide My Email and Firefox Relay offer free alternatives for email masking. Enable two factor authentication on every account that supports it, and consider a privacy focused browser extension to block trackers that feed the data broker pipeline.

The data broker industry exists because most people do not know their data is being sold. The first step is finding out.