Ben Brook

Ben Brook is co-founder and chief executive of Transcend, whose software encodes privacy rules across a company’s systems to handle data deletion requests, consent, and AI governance. He started Transcend with Michael Farrell, a friend from Harvard, and has spent its history arguing that privacy should be enforced in code.

Rejected 18 times

He and Farrell became friends studying computer science at Harvard and talked constantly about privacy, Business Insider reported. Right before graduation they flew to Silicon Valley to pitch investors. “We got rejected like 18 times,” he said. On the way to the airport to fly home, a Harvard alumnus called and offered them a $50,000 check.

“We were so passionate about privacy. We had an inkling that things were about to be different in the privacy world,” he said. As Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation approached in 2018, Transcend found its first customers among small and medium businesses.

Starting over on security

Large companies stalled on the first product because it lacked the security they required. The founders rebuilt it on a zero trust security model, which cost them about a year, according to South Park Commons. “I think all of it just came down to us being entirely mission driven and believing in it, really,” he said.

He told EO that early prospects refused to buy, so Transcend offered to act as an extended privacy engineering team for its first customers and built its software from what it learned. He tells founders to price high, because “most founders are shocked at what the market will pay for their product.”

Rules for AI agents

He sees privacy teams taking on AI governance as companies feed more personal data into AI systems. In October 2026 Transcend launched Rails, a policy-as-code product that decides in real time what each AI agent is allowed to do.