Ethyca Welcomes Julie Brill and Daniel Weitzner to Our Board
Julie Brill and Daniel Weitzner have joined Ethyca’s Board of Directors. Their decision to join is a milestone for our company, but more importantly, it is a signal of where the entire industry is heading.
The next chapter of enterprise data is being written right now. At Ethyca, we’ve spent the last six years building toward a single idea: AI will only scale if enterprises can rely on a trusted data foundation. Without that foundation, the vast majority of AI projects fail. Not because of the models, but because the data layer cannot carry the context required to make them safe, compliant, and commercially viable.
This week, I’m thrilled to share that Julie Brill and Daniel Weitzner have joined Ethyca’s Board of Directors. Their decision to join is a milestone for our company, but more importantly, it is a signal of where the entire industry is heading.
Why Julie and Daniel matter
Julie Brill has been at the forefront of global privacy for decades. From her time as a Commissioner at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to her former role as Microsoft’s Chief Privacy Officer. She has helped define the contours of modern privacy and regulatory practice in technology.
Daniel Weitzner is one of the world’s leading thinkers at the intersection of computer science, internet governance, and policy. As Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House, and now as Director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, his work has shaped the way governments, enterprises, and researchers approach accountability in complex digital systems.
Both Julie and Daniel bring unmatched expertise in the precise problem Ethyca is solving: how to operationalize context and accountability in data infrastructure. Their joining our board reinforces the urgency of that challenge and our responsibility in building the system that solves it.
The evolution of enterprise data
Enterprise teams have already recognized the reality: the limiting factor in AI adoption isn’t algorithms or compute. It’s the ability to maintain data context at scale. That point was underscored by yesterday's news from Europe, where proposed shifts to GDPR and the EU AI Act showed how quickly regulatory expectations around data and AI can change.
As frameworks continue to evolve, organizations will still face the same core challenge: preserving context in the systems that power AI.
When context is lost, whether that’s consent, policy, lineage, or jurisdictional rights, organizations face an impossible choice: either proceed with unacceptable risk, or slow down innovation with endless manual verification. That’s why, according to recent RAND research, 80 percent of AI projects fail and can’t deliver real value.
Every signal we see in the market points to the same conclusion: AI adoption is accelerating, and enterprises that solve the data context challenge will be the ones that lead.”Cillian Kieran, Founder & CEO, Ethyca
The Astralis whitepaper we recently published explores this in depth: the future of AI innovation depends on enforcing data rights and obligations in the same automated, systematic way we enforce security or reliability. Enterprises can no longer afford to treat context as a compliance afterthought. It must be engineered directly into infrastructure.
This is exactly what Ethyca exists to provide. Our trusted data layer ensures that context (lineage, consent, policy) is embedded into every data flow, so enterprises can move at the velocity of AI without compounding governance debt.
Trusted data infrastructure
Bringing Julie and Daniel onto our board is part of a broader shift: Ethyca is not simply building data tools, but defining a new category of enterprise infrastructure. Trusted data infrastructure will become as inevitable for AI as cloud platforms became for software.
That requires more than technology. It requires leadership that understands how regulations evolve, how enterprises adapt, and how policy and engineering converge. Julie and Daniel bring exactly that perspective.
I couldn’t be more excited for what this means for our customers and our team. With their guidance, Ethyca will accelerate our mission to give every enterprise the ability to deploy AI with trust engineered-in from the start.
A future worth building
Every signal we see in the market points to the same conclusion: AI adoption is accelerating, and enterprises that solve the data context challenge will be the ones that lead. The gap between AI ambition and AI reality will widen for those who treat governance as a process problem. It will close for those who engineer it as infrastructure.
Julie Brill and Daniel Weitzner have spent their careers shaping the frameworks that define trust in technology. I’m honored they see in Ethyca the opportunity to build the infrastructure that carries those frameworks into the age of AI.
This is a pivotal moment for our company. But more than that, it’s a pivotal moment for the industry. We are building the substrate on which safe, scalable AI will run. And we are just getting started.
-Cillian Kieran, Founder & CEO, Ethyca
AI will only achieve its promise if it is built on trusted data foundations. Ethyca’s approach puts privacy, security, and policy at the heart of enterprise data infrastructure.”Julie Brill, Former Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer
If your firm is still treating governance as a checkpoint at the finish line, now is the moment to rethink. Book an intro with Ethyca to see how embedded governance can transform your AI development into a true competitive advantage.
About Ethyca: Ethyca is the trusted data layer for enterprise AI, providing unified privacy, governance, and AI oversight infrastructure that enables organizations to confidently scale AI initiatives while maintaining compliance across evolving regulatory landscapes.
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