Encryption Firm With NSA Roots Raises $10 Million

Enveil, a Fulton, Maryland-based data security company, today announced that it has secured $10 million in Series A funding. 

Founded in 2016, Enveil launched ZeroReveal in July 2018, its commercial homomorphic encryption product that helps protect data while it’s being used or processed. 

The core technology originates from within the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Enveil’s CEO and founder, Ellison Anne Williams, worked on the project within the NSA as a senior researcher for 12 years. When she left in 2015 she took the technology with her, exclusively, and founded Enveil. Since then, Enveil expanded and matured the core technology to the point of launching its commercial product and raising capital. 

“We have two-party form factor,” Williams previously told SecurityWeek. “From a technology standpoint, it means that we can take a search or analytic that folks will want to perform over data, and we can encrypt that, and then we can run that encrypted search over massive amounts of data anywhere, without ever decrypting anything. We never decrypt the search itself, and if the underlying data also happens to be encrypted, we don’t have to decrypt that either. We accomplish this through the ZeroReveal Compute Fabric where we can encrypt the search, send that out to the data location, and that can be processed there without ever being decrypted.”

According to Enveil, the additional investment will support product development, fuel expansion in commercial and government markets, and grow sales and customer support functions.

The Series A round was led by C5 Capital with participation from others including Mastercard, Capital One Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and 1843 Capital. The round adds to the more than $5 million in funding raised from previous investors, including DataTribe, In-Q-Tel, Cyber Mentor Fund, and Refinitiv.

“Enveil is stepping up to solve a fundamental security challenge: preserving privacy while ensuring that data remains usable,” said Zulfe Ali, Managing Partner at C5 Capital. “By empowering organizations to secure data throughout its lifecycle, Enveil’s contributions go beyond adding business value and ensuring compliance – we believe the company’s innovative use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies will positively impact enterprise and consumer privacy and security across verticals.”