One day after FBI Director Kash Patel told senators his agency purchases commercially available location data to track Americans, a startup just raised $375 million on the premise that people — and now companies — will pay to make that harder.

Cloaked, founded by brothers Arjun and Abhijay Bhatnagar in 2020, announced its Series B round on Thursday. General Catalyst and Liberty City Ventures led the mix of equity and growth financing, with Lux Capital, Human Capital, DuckDuckGo, and the NFL Players Association among the participants. For context, the company’s Series A was $25 million in 2022. This is a 15x jump.

The product started simple: generate disposable email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords so you never hand your real data to any service. Since then Cloaked has bolted on a VPN, dark web monitoring, data removal, and identity theft insurance. The company saw 10x growth over the past year and reports more than 350,000 paying customers.

The real signal is the enterprise expansion. Cloaked is now offering businesses the same identity-shielding tools it sells consumers — including identity and password management for employees. Privacy, in other words, is graduating from a personal subscription to a line item on the corporate security budget.

That pivot tracks with the regulatory vacuum. The Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling requires warrants for carrier location data, but information purchased from data brokers sits in a legal gray zone. Senator Ron Wyden called the FBI’s practice “an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment.” Until Congress closes the gap — and the bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act is still just a bill — the market is filling the void.

Three hundred seventy-five million dollars says the demand is real.

Sources