Cillian Kieran

Founder and CEO Ethyca

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Cillian Kieran is the founder and chief executive of Ethyca, a New York company building what it calls the trusted data layer for enterprise and AI. The premise is that privacy compliance fails when it is treated as a legal and reporting exercise sitting downstream of engineering — a spreadsheet of data flows that is obsolete the week after it is compiled — and that it only works when consent, data inventory, subject-request handling and policy enforcement are implemented as infrastructure inside the engineering stack itself. Ethyca therefore sells to developers rather than exclusively to legal and compliance teams, and packages the problem as a set of named systems: Fides for governance taxonomy, Helios for data inventory, Janus for consent orchestration, Lethe for automated data subject requests, and Astralis for AI policy enforcement. Kieran founded the company in 2018 after two decades running data-intensive businesses, having concluded from that experience that there had to be a better way to build trust deeper into large, distributed systems.

Career Highlights

• Founded Ethyca in 2018 and leads it as chief executive.
• Raised a $4.2 million seed round in 2018 and a $13.5 million Series A in 2021.
• Built Ethyca’s product suite covering governance taxonomy, data inventory, consent orchestration, automated data subject requests and AI policy enforcement.
• Recruited Julie Brill and Daniel Weitzner to the board.
• Won customers including Away, Slice, Codecademy, InVision, Hopin and Casper.
• Founded and ran the digital consultancy CKSK from 2006 to 2016, scaling it past 100 employees across four offices and serving Fortune 500 clients including PepsiCo and Heineken.
• Co-founded the retail technology startup BrandCommerce between 2016 and 2018.
• Spoke at USENIX Enigma 2022 on an open-source taxonomy for ex-ante privacy, and at All Things Open 2022.
• Writes regularly for CPO Magazine on privacy engineering.

Professional Journey

Kieran’s first company was CKSK, a digital consultancy he founded in 2006 and ran for a decade, building it past 100 employees across four offices and working with Fortune 500 clients including PepsiCo and Heineken. Consultancy work of that kind puts you inside a great many organisations’ data estates without giving you authority over any of them, which is an unusually good vantage point for seeing how badly enterprises handle personal data at scale — and how little the gap between stated policy and actual system behaviour tends to trouble anyone until something goes wrong.

In 2016 he left to co-found BrandCommerce, a retail technology startup, which he ran until 2018. Across both ventures he was working with large, distributed, data-intensive systems, and by his own account the conclusion he reached was that trust had to be engineered into those systems rather than asserted about them after the fact.

He founded Ethyca in 2018 on that thesis, raising a $4.2 million seed round the same year. The regulatory environment was obliging: GDPR came into force in May 2018 and CCPA followed, creating obligations — the right of access, the right to deletion, granular consent — that are trivial to write into law and genuinely hard to implement inside a company with hundreds of services and no reliable map of where personal data sits. Ethyca built for that implementation gap, aiming its tooling at engineers and embedding ethical, user-centric principles into the software rather than describing them in a policy document.

The product line reflects that decomposition of the problem. Fides provides an open-source governance taxonomy — a shared vocabulary for describing what data is and what may be done with it, which is the prerequisite for automating anything else. Helios maintains the data inventory, Janus orchestrates consent, and Lethe automates data subject requests end to end. Astralis extends the same approach to AI policy enforcement, which is where the company now positions itself, unifying privacy, governance and policy enforcement into what it calls a trusted data layer for enterprise and AI.

The company raised a $13.5 million Series A in 2021 and has built a customer base including Away, Slice, Codecademy, InVision, Hopin and Casper, alongside a board that includes Julie Brill and Daniel Weitzner. Kieran has been an active public advocate for privacy engineering as a discipline, presenting “An Open-Source Taxonomy for Ex-ante Privacy” at USENIX Enigma 2022, speaking at All Things Open the same year, and contributing regularly to CPO Magazine.

Education

No education could be established. Neither Ethyca’s own biography page for Kieran, nor its about page, nor his USENIX Enigma speaker profile names an institution, degree or field, and his company describes him as a seasoned privacy engineer without stating any qualification.