Platform enables multiple organisations to extract value from each other’s decentralised data sets and overcome regulatory, technical, and commercial challenges.

Berlin, Germany, September 21st – Apheris, the platform for building collaborative data ecosystems, has officially launched with a mission to revolutionize how organizations collaborate and extract value from distributed datasets. Apheris believes the next wave of innovation to solve the world’s biggest problems will only be made possible by unlocking the terabytes of data each individual organisation has access to. With data economies in EU27 countries set to grow in value to €550 billion by 2025, the Federated Data Platform from Apheris will give businesses the ability to securely access complementary data, break down data silos, and to jointly answer questions and solve problems that they would be unable to do on their own.

Regulatory and technical challenges have until now prevented true data collaborations. With Apheris, data never moves – its platform enables a federated approach, allowing all parties to have complete control over data governance and in turn ensuring security, privacy, and IP protection. With full integration into existing data science workflows and processes, and leveraging standards for interoperability, Apheris is addressing the challenges many industries are facing around the need for more, better quality data.

Founded in 2019 by Robin Röhm and Michael Höh, Apheris has a team of over 30 best-in-class specialists with a unified aim of unlocking the power of data and having a positive impact on the planet. Its collaborative data ecosystem platform is already facilitating problem solving in areas such as patient healthcare – for example a disease-specific data ecosystem is currently enabling pharma companies to collaborate, share datasets and extract value to gain a more complete understanding of these diseases.

Apheris is funded by renowned investors including LocalGlobe, System One, Another.VC, MuleSoft Founder Ross Mason’s fund, Dig Ventures and angel investor and former CFO of Google, Patrick Pichette.

Robin Röhm, Apheris CEO and co-founder said: “We believe that the largest problems our planet is facing can only be solved if organizations collaborate. We are committed to enabling industries to work collaboratively across data and AI by removing the need for data sharing and breaking down the complexities, risks, and barriers that make it almost impossible. Some of the best work in data science and AI will happen across organizational boundaries and there is no limit to the impact we have if we work together.” 

Key features of the Apheris platform:

Scalable, fully, federated approach

Data never moves, and analyses and ML computations are brought to the data to ensure data sovereignty, ownership, and IP are all protected. With a focus on automating processes for data providers, and by ensuring inherent scalability across multiple computations, the Apheris solution works for even the largest of enterprises.

Collaboration governance
For collaboration to be successful, strong governance is a must. With the Apheris platform, data providers stay in full control of data and define access through robust controls. All parties have access to material and training that helps them design blueprints for processes and structures to standardize for successful collaboration. 

Integrate into the existing data stack

Data scientists who want to run federated analyses from an existing code base can bring their machine learning models, analytics approaches, and full data pipelines to the Apheris platform and will be able to run it against distributed datasets with minimal adjustment. 

Apheris provides full support for the data science workflow and consequently includes integrations with all tools familiar to a data scientist making adoption straightforward.

Enterprise security and privacy

Fine-grained access controls and asset policies determine who has access and for what purpose. Logging every interaction allows for traceability and auditing to meet regulatory needs and allow for explainable use of data.

Organizations can use the platform across multiple use cases and benefit from multiple privacy-enhancing technologies. Our approach allows users to set the appropriate level of privacy for the type of data so that maximum value is extracted from any dataset. This gives organizations the means to easily scale their use of the Apheris Platform. 

Deploy Apheris in a way that suits

Recognizing that each organization will have different needs, Apheris provides different deployment modes including on-premises and different cloud environments. Apheris provides all deployments as Infrastructure-As-Code. For those who would like help getting started, the Apheris team can support and configure deployments on behalf of customers to get them up and running more quickly.