Sequoia Capital has doubled down on its early-stage investment in Skiff, a startup building a security-themed, end-to-end encrypted workspace collaboration platform.
The prominent venture capital firm is leading a $10.5 million Series A investment in Skiff, betting there’s big profits to be made on “products that are fully private and where users own their own data.”
In addition to Sequoia Capital, Skiff announced a list of prominent angel investors joining the round, including John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Gaby Goldberg, a crypto investor at TCG, and Albert Ni, from Dropbox and the Ethereum Foundation.
Skiff, based in San Francisco, California, is positioning its workspace collaboration platform as a “completely private, end-to-end encrypted workspace ideal for teams that want full control over their own data.”
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“Everything from building a personal knowledge base to writing collaborative meeting notes is done in complete privacy. No one, not even Skiff, can ever see the title, content, or description of a user’s document,” the company said.
The workspace collaboration market is currently dominated by heavyweights like Microsoft and Google but there are lingering enterprise security concerns around data storage and third-party access that could expose organizations to risk.
In addition to end-to-end encryption of all their data, Skiff said its customers would have the option to use the decentralized Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocol for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.
“Account creation and document sharing can also be completed using a decentralized, self-managed crypto identity, such as an Ethereum wallet,” Skiff said.
The company has published a white paper describing the threat model and security posture of its decentralized workspace technology.
Since its launch in 2020, Skiff has raised a total of $14.2 million.
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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.
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