Enveil, an early-stage startup tackling the ‘holy grail’ of data encryption, has banked another $25 million in funding as investors continue to pour money into the privacy enhancing technology space.
The company, which has its roots at the U.S. government’s NSA, said the Series B round was led by USAA with contributions from existing investors including Mastercard, Capital One Ventures, C5 Capital, DataTribe, In-Q-Tel, Cyber Mentor Fund, Bloomberg Beta, GC&H, and 1843 Capital.
Since launching in 2016, Enveil has raised a total of $40 million in venture capital funding and is considered one of the more mature players in the competitive PET (privacy enhancing technologies) category.
Enveil said the new financing will be used to expand sales, product development, and marketing activity to capitalize on a growing global need for tools to manage computation against encrypted data in secure ways.
[ READ: Investors Bet Big on Attempts to Solve Encryption ‘Holy Grail’ ]
Enveil, the brainchild of former NSA mathematician Ellison Anne Williams, said its technology allows organizations to extract insights, cross-match, search, and analyze data assets at scale without ever revealing the content of the search itself.
The company said its decentralized approach allows data to be securely shared between entities and across organizational, jurisdictional, and security boundaries, expanding data access and utility without the need to move or pool sensitive assets. “These business and mission-enabling capabilities allow data to be used in ways that were not previously possible,” Enveil said.
The company has lots of competition among similar startups. Last year, several early-stage companies — Duality Technologies ($30 million, Series B), Tonic.ai ($35m Series B), and Gretel ($50 million, Series B) — raised a combined $115 million to keep pace in the race to allow “privacy enhancing computation” on encrypted data without the need to decrypt and expose sensitive data.
The funding flurry follows a recent Gartner report picking privacy-enhancing computation as one of 2021’s top strategic technology trends and predicting that by 2025, half of large organizations will adopt privacy-enhancing computation as a means of processing data.
Existing encryption products seek to protect data while stored or in transmission, but the data must be decrypted — and exposed — if entities want to run computations or train machine learning models. The category of Privacy Enhancing Technologies — particularly homomorphic encryption — has emerged as a way to allow multi-party data sharing and computation without the need to decrypt and expose sensitive data or intellectual property.
Related: Encryption Firm With NSA Roots Raises $10 Million
Related: Data Security Startup Enveil Unveils Homomorphic Encryption
Related: Google Ships Open Source Tools, Libraries for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
More from Ryan Naraine
- Project Zero: Samsung Mobile Chipsets Vulnerable to Baseband Code Execution Exploits
- Rapid7 Buys Anti-Ransomware Firm Minerva Labs for $38 Million
- Microsoft Pins Outlook Zero-Day Attacks on Russian Actor, Offers Detection Script
- Microsoft Warns of Outlook Zero-Day Exploitation, Patches 80 Security Vulns
- Adobe Warns of ‘Very Limited Attacks’ Exploiting ColdFusion Zero-Day
- Cloud Forensics Startup Mitiga Completes $45M Series A
- Blackbaud Fined $3M For ‘Misleading Disclosures’ About 2020 Ransomware Attack
- Cado Security Banks $20M in Series B Funding
Latest News
- Millions Stolen in Hack at Cryptocurrency ATM Manufacturer General Bytes
- Waterfall Security, TXOne Networks Launch New OT Security Appliances
- Hitachi Energy Blames Data Breach on Zero-Day as Ransomware Gang Threatens Firm
- NBA Notifying Individuals of Data Breach at Mailing Services Provider
- Adobe Acrobat Sign Abused to Distribute Malware
- New York Man Arrested for Running BreachForums Cybercrime Website
- Huawei Has Replaced Thousands of US-Banned Parts With Chinese Versions: Founder
- Latitude Financial Services Data Breach Impacts 300,000 Customers
