40 Under 40 nominee Nabanita De is a visionary serial technology entrepreneur who is reshaping the future of privacy and AI.
As founder and CEO of PrivacyLicense.ai, she’s building the world’s first privacy operating system for the AI era with their flagship product, AI Privacy License, serving as the missing enforcement layer for the $50 billion AI data economy, a revolutionary internet contract that serves as “robots.txt with legal teeth,” enabling creators and AI companies to work as partners, where they work together under a universal, shared, legally enforceable, machine-readable standard.
Nabanita’s Background
Nabanita De’s record is wide and public-facing. As a master’s student at UMass Amherst, she led the team that built FiB, a Chrome extension that detects fake news on Facebook. FiB won the Google Moonshot Prize at Princeton, ranked among the top five news stories of 2016, and attracted coverage in more than a thousand outlets, including Business Insider, the Washington Post, Wired, CNN, and the BBC. The project ran as a case study at over 40 universities worldwide and earned her an invite to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit.
Her competitive track record includes winning more than 20 hackathons, including the Global AWS GenAI Hackathon, Microsoft Hack for Good, Techcruch Disrupt Hackathon Qualifiers and MIT Media Lab’s AR/VR hackathon. Her prize cabinet includes over 51 technology awards and scholarships, such as Uber Rockstar Leadership award, Facebook Scholar for Women in Cyber Security, Microsoft Grace Hopper Scholar, Facebook F8 Scholar, and Webby recognition.
She has also volunteered for over 100 nonprofits and, as a UNICEF state lead, helped mobilise fundraising that contributed to $134 million in US government support and assisted in passing two national legislative bills. During the pandemic, she built CovidHelpForIndia.com to streamline relief resources.
At 18, she launched Bluetooth Messenger, which reached 50,000 downloads and topped the App Store’s New and Rising list. The app won the BITSAA Mantra Entrepreneur of the Year award, and she was named to the BITSAA Global 30 Under 30 list in 2022.
She has also written 20 Forbes articles with 500,000 reads, three Pulitzer Prize nominations, and recognition on Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas list.
An exclusive peek into the 40 Under 40 interview with Entrepreneurs Today.
Interviewer: What led you to venture into this domain?
Nabanita: “My vision was to reimagine privacy as the foundation of the next internet, creating a seamless, automated trust layer that empowers creators and companies to protect rights, unlock markets, and innovate without limits.
With 12+ years of privacy and AI leadership at companies like Microsoft, Uber, Paramount, Fintech, Banks, etc, where I saved over $5 billion in infra and compliance costs, I have experienced firsthand the crisis in global privacy compliance. She is creating a universal infrastructure that transforms privacy from a compliance burden into a competitive advantage.
Eventually, I also founded the Nabanita De Foundation, which tackles humanitarian moonshot challenges through technology, entrepreneurship, and advocacy. The foundation has established partnerships with Forbes, Audible, and Amazon, and its initiatives have been adopted by 135 countries.”
Interviewer: What gap in the AI ecosystem were you trying to solve?
Nabanita: “I watched Fortune 500 companies deploy armies of lawyers while seed-stage founders saw their launches stall for months over basic privacy questions. Meanwhile, AI companies were scraping the internet with no mechanism for creators to get credit or compensation, leading to billion-dollar lawsuits like the recent $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, and also the creation of AI Actors with source faces of actors without credit or compensation, which are getting backlash over the Internet.
In August 2025, when the EU AI Act enforcement began, AI companies faced €35M penalties but had no practical implementation path. I realized the industry needed what Martijn Koster did for web crawling in 1994 with robots.txt, but for the AI era, with legal teeth. So I built AI Privacy License.”
Interviewer: Is this really a fight between creators and AI, or something deeper?
Nabanita: “First, the internet connected information. Now, AI learns from it. And what comes next will redefine them both. The internet has no shared rules for how AI uses content, and no infrastructure for creators and AI companies to work together. This isn’t a fight between creators and AI. It’s missing infrastructure at the internet’s core. AI Privacy License is that missing layer. Your content becomes a self-enforcing, legally binding protocol, traveling across the AI ecosystem with its rights intact, automatically executing your rules anywhere it goes.
It’s upon the creators to define their own terms with training permissions, attribution, commercial use, NDAs, pre-clearance, and more. AI companies read them instantly, license in seconds, stay compliant by design, and innovate with trust. This is the infrastructure on which the next internet will be built. Transforming creative works into autonomous digital assets, self-protecting, self-enforcing, generating value for their creators, and providing AI companies with clear, compliant access.”
Interviewer: What’s causing so many companies to struggle with privacy compliance today?
Nabanita: “Privacy Compliance is Broken, and it’s holding businesses back with manual workflows, siloed data, and evolving regulations. It costs businesses $50B+ in fines and slows innovation to a crawl. The old approach particularly fails due to under-resourced teams, slow, manual processes, data silos everywhere, fragmented, fast-changing laws, massive penalties, no shared privacy language, disconnected tools, no universal standards, and unclear guidance for teams.”
Interviewer: Do you see this as the beginning of a new infrastructure layer for AI governance?
Nabanita: “In 1994, Martijn Koster built robots.txt, a simple machine-readable file and gentlemen’s agreement. In 2025, AI systems no longer need a simple “block the bots or allow all” approach. They need nuanced systems with strategies for what happens after scraping is complete, a post-governance protocol. And given that AI now understands humans, this breakthrough is finally possible!
AI Privacy License is the DNS of AI Compliance, a foundational layer that every AI company, creator, and organization will rely on, the legally binding data governance post-crawl protocol that works for BOTH AI companies, content creators, and organizations. AI Privacy License is backed by copyright and contract law, plus a missing implementation layer of EU AI Act Article 53(1)(c). It has already been adopted by creators from 42 countries in the first week of launch.”
Interviewer: What challenges have you faced while building the AI Privacy License?
Nabanita: “Building credibility as a solo founder in a space dominated by large players. As a woman of color building infrastructure-level technology, there is always initial bias in the industry towards whether women of color could create a universal standard. By my solution getting adoption in 42 countries in first week of release, I was able to prove my talent and product market fit for this groundbreaking solution as a solo founder.
The other challenge was achieving adoption across 42 countries in the first week without a sales team. I built an organic, community-led GTM flywheel through Privacy Champions, consultant partnerships, open-source strategy, and thought leadership, proving the market urgency was real.”
Interviewer: Our readers would like to know about the major milestone you have reached. Which are the ones you are most proud of?
Nabanita: “One of the major achievements has been submitting my built products and winning major hackathons solo, including AWS GenAI Global among 3,000+ participants, with $22K+ in total prizes. Also, I secured a position as an IAPP Privacy Engineering Board Member, the largest privacy association in the world, with access to all Privacy decision makers from Fortune 500 companies, alongside Axon, Cisco, Amazon, Snap, Infosys, Toyota, TCS, Google, Canva, HP, Mastercard, etc.
We also built a Privacy Champions community of 120+ leaders from Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Visa, Unilever, KPMG, PwC, Samsung, TD, Discover, T. Rowe Price, Infosys, HCL, Siemens, Raymond James, Roku, Skyscanner, Hershey’s, EXL, Imax, Grammarly, Loom, Tractable, ResMed, Lumin Digital, Imax, Paytm, Allegis Group, Occidental Petroleum, Yellow Card and more.
Our other achievements include consultant Partnerships, exclusive Industry Networks, and thought leadership through a 1,642-subscriber newsletter. I was also featured on NASDAQ Tower, speaking at MIT, and partnering with NASDAQ, Wells Fargo, and others. We also have 4 patents pending and open-source adoption in 42 countries.”
