Ransomware Recovery Startup Calamu Banks $16.5M Investment

Calamu, an early-stage cybersecurity startup building technology to help businesses recover from ransomware infections, has raised $16.5 million in venture capital funding.

The Clinton, New Jersey-based company said the Series A round brings the total raised to $20 million and will be used to accelerate team expansion and further evolve the product platform.

The new financing was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing seed investor Dell Technologies Capital.

Calamu is working on a nifty approach to securing and protecting data by encrypting and fragmenting data at the source — cloud applications or local file systems — and  scattering individually re-encrypted fragments across big-cloud storage locations such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. 

[ ANALYSIS: Law Enforcement Blowback, Cyber Insurance Renewals Powering Anti-Ransomware Successes ]

According to Calamu, this redundant virtual storage environment (known as a data harbor), helps to eliminate commonly exploited attack vectors because a complete data object doesn’t exist in any one place or provider. 

“Keeping sensitive data out of enemy hands is a top priority for the enterprise given the constant threat of ransomware and increased pressure from regulators. Hackers continue to breach enterprise data systems whether the data is stored in the cloud or on-premises, and have found ways to bypass defensive tactics and cripple operations,” the company said. 

Data protected with Calamu is useless to the hacker if stolen, and automatically self-heals if attacked by ransomware,” it added.

Calamu chief executive Paul Lewis explained that the technology prevents attackers from getting anything of value, and allows authorized users and applications to continue accessing pristine data as if nothing happened.

[ READ: Five Key Signals From Russia’s REvil Ransomware Bust  ]

Calamu’s funding round comes as global organizations continue to struggle with an explosion of data-extortion ransomware attacks over the last two years.

According to a new advisory released this week by the U.S. government’s cybersecurity response agency CISA, ransomware continues to be a significant problem for government agencies and businesses of all sizes.

The agency said 14 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the U.S. were targeted by ransomware in 2020 and there’s a noticeable observation this year that ransomware groups are now focused on hitting mid-market targets in the U.S.

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