Approximately eight months ago, legal tech startup Infinnium dropped into a market filled with no shortage of players. All were rushing to service the compliance and data management-related needs created by the rise of regulatory regimes such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation or the forthcoming California Consumer Privacy Act.

Whereas incumbents may have had the advantage of an established name, Infinnium was starting without much in the way of brand recognition. In fact, all the company had was a piece of machine learning powered software called ObscurePI and an ability to flash buzzwords like "AI."

And even that may be losing its novelty.

"It is challenging to kind of differentiate because everybody claims that they're using artificial intelligence," said Infinnium's co-founder and chief success officer Harsh Sutaria.

ObscurePI was developed to sit behind an organization's firewall and assist with information governance efforts related to HIPAA, data privacy or compliance. To that end, it can also identify documents that contain pieces of personally identifiable information (PII).

But even that by itself isn't enough to help a startup like Infinnium stand entirely apart from other entrants in the field. For example, the legal tech company ayfie offers a software suite that uses a combination of text analytics and linguistics-based information retrieval to filter unstructured data sets for PII or other relevant items.

Per Sutaria, attracting consumer attention while standing among all of the other brands in the marketplace can be difficult even for an established company. "It's harder when you are a startup because you don't have the résumé to prove yourself. You have to prove your technology, and that's the natural course action of any startup," he said.

And the herd of competitors is unlikely to be thinned any time soon. Dave Deasy, vice president of marketing at TrustArc, told Legaltech News in July that stiff fines and regulatory reporting requirements were driving venture capital investment into data privacy compliance tech.

The same appears to be true for e-discovery, which presents many of the same needs with regards to identifying, managing and extracting information.

"You've got private equity money coming because the returns on investment of e-discovery actually have been good from a private equity perspective. Very good, very quickly," Mike Dalewitz, president and founder of Review Right, told Legaltech News in March.

For a startup like Infinnium, all of this interest is potentially double-edged sword. Sure, there's a market for the services it's providing, but the scope of that market could put more pressure on the company to drill down on its mission and find the niche within the niche.

For example, Paul Hill, senior consultant for SystemExperts Corp., had suspected that data privacy compliance companies would select sub-specialties like legal advice or data tracking to focus upon.

"There are a lot of moving pieces. I suspect [data privacy compliance] companies will concentrate on a particular area," he said.

Sutaria indicated that Infinnium intends to hang its hat on what users are able to do with a piece of sensitive data after they've located it. Last month, the company released 4iG, a suite for information governance that both seeks out sensitive data and then facilitate a process by which those documents can be encrypted, redacted or anonymized.

"There's great software that is out there right now that is providing some form of visibility into this information, but one of the biggest areas that we saw throughout our time that was needed was really the ability to act," Sutaria said.

How Infinnium will maintain that point of distinction into the future as customer needs continue to shift and evolve remains to be seen.

Sutaria explained, "I think with technology, in order to stay relevant you have to constantly innovate. It's just a fact of life and I think it's a matter of figuring out what's the best way to innovate."