Cillian Kieran, Founder and CEO of Ethyca – Interview Series

Interviews Cillian Kieran, Founder and CEO of Ethyca – Interview Series Published August 4, 2026 By Antoine Tardif, CEO & Founder of Unite.AI Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google Cillian Kieran, Founder and CEO of Ethyca, is a serial entrepreneur and privacy engineer with more than two decades of experience building data-intensive technology businesses. Before founding Ethyca in 2019, he led digital agency CKSK for a decade and subsequently founded BrandCommerce, drawing on his background in software engineering, user experience and large-scale enterprise data programmes. At Ethyca, Kieran has focused on transforming privacy and data governance from a largely manual compliance function into infrastructure that can be embedded directly within how organisations build and operate technology.Ethyca develops trusted data infrastructure that helps enterprises discover sensitive information, manage consent, fulfil privacy requests and enforce rules governing how data is used across conventional applications and artificial intelligence systems. Its platform is built around Fides, an open-source governance language that creates a consistent framework for defining, auditing and enforcing permitted data uses across systems, APIs and AI pipelines. The company is now launching Astralis, an AI governance layer combining automated regulatory assessments with purpose-based access controls, enabling organisations to determine why models and agents are accessing particular data and enforce those permissions in real time. Ethyca says the platform can reduce assessments that traditionally require 40 to 60 hours of manual work to approximately 20 to 40 minutes, helping enterprises expand AI deployments without allowing governance processes to become a bottleneck.You founded multiple companies before launching Ethyca in 2019, including building CKSK into a global digital consultancy serving Fortune 500 organizations. What experiences during that journey convinced you that data governance, instead of AI models themselves, would become the defining bottleneck for enterprise AI adoption?I spent years building a digital consultancy servicing large enterprises like Heineken, Sony, and Pepsi during the digital advertising and social media gold rush. Time and again, I watched the same pattern play out. A powerful technology arrives, everyone races to adopt it, and only once it’s embedded in the business do regulators show up to put guardrails around it, leaving compliance teams to deal with the consequences. Take GDPR, the first real crackdown on how companies use personal data. Regulators only stepped in after martech and social media had already turned data collection into the backbone of their business models. It was obvious to me that the same pattern would occur with AI.What solidified this hunch I had was the privacy compliance work I was doing at Ethyca. Building compliance systems for large enterprises, I realised you could put a layer around a company’s data that evaluated every request against three things: what the data is, what you’re permitted to do with it, and what the risk is if you do. Working on that made the real constraint obvious. Enterprises aren’t short on data. They’re short on a governance layer that dictates w