New Delhi, June 25 -- Every regulatory shift creates infrastructure. SOX created the audit software category. PCI-DSS created the payment security category. Just like GDPR in Europe, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, with enforcement beginning November 2026, it's creating its own: consent infrastructure.

Not consent banners. Not privacy policy generators. Infrastructure that sits between consent capture and every system that processes personal data, enforcing compliance in real time, generating audit evidence automatically, and preserving data quality for marketing teams that depend on it.

That is the thesis behind NodGuard, launched this week by Compass. "We are not building a consent management platform", says Adittya Joshi, Co-founder of Compass. "We are building the enforcement and evidence layer that has to exist between consent capture and marketing execution. That layer does not exist in most Indian enterprises today. When DPDP enforcement begins, its absence will be felt."

The Product

NodGuard captures DPDP-compliant consent in 23 Indian languages, enforces consent state across every outbound marketing channel (email, SMS, WhatsApp, CRM, CDP, Conversion APIs) at the point of dispatch, enables attribution on consent-verified data only, and generates tamper-proof audit evidence.

It deploys in 30 minutes by wrapping existing marketing stacks. No rip-and-replace. No migration. The system defaults to blocking data processing on any failure, ensuring compliance is never compromised by infrastructure outages.

The Market

DPDP applies to enterprises across every sector that process personal data digitally. Industry estimates suggest fewer than 15% have infrastructure capable of enforcing consent decisions across their marketing stack.

The gap is not on the consent capture side. Cookie banners and consent management platforms exist. The gap is on the enforcement side: what happens after consent is captured. When a user withdraws consent, who tells the CRM? The CDP? The ad platform? How fast? And who proves it happened?

"That is a Rs.3,000 to 5,000 crore infrastructure problem in India alone", says Gayathri Maalige, the Co-founder of Compass. "Every enterprise needs it. Most do not have it."

Compass as a Company

Compass is a marketing infrastructure company building products for Indian enterprises at the intersection of marketing performance and data compliance. Founded in Bengaluru, the company builds infrastructure that helps brands market effectively, measure accurately, and stay compliant under India's evolving regulatory environment.

NodGuard, its first product, is a consent infrastructure for the DPDP era. Additional products are in development across marketing intelligence, feed management and local marketing infrastructure.

About NodGuard

NodGuard is consent infrastructure for modern marketing. Built for India's DPDP era, NodGuard captures compliant consent in 23 Indian languages, enforces it across every marketing channel at the point of dispatch, enables consent-verified attribution, and generates tamper-proof audit evidence exportable on demand. NodGuard is a product of Compass and is now available at www.nodguard.in

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Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.