V-Key Lands $4 Million To Expand Its Mobile Application Protection Solutions

V-Key, a Redwood City, California-based startup that makes mobile middleware to help protect mobile applications from threats, this week announced that it has secured $4 million in funding.

According to the company, the new cash will be used to fuel research and development in mobile applications security and intelligence technology, and to expand the company’s sales and support operations in the United States and Asia Pacific.

V-Key’s technology helps protect against threats coming as a result of known and unknown mobile application-level attacks. As companies continue to deploy enterprise mobile applications, employees often hold sensitive company data on their mobile devices. As a result, attackers are increasingly looking to compromise mobile platforms in order to hunt down sensitive data and user information.

Using “heuristic correlation algorithms”, along with a secure mobile virtual machine firewall “wrapper”, the company says its V-Guard mobile security protection and mobile threat analytics (V-Track) helps address advanced persistence threats in the mobile applications landscape.

Additionally, the company offers V-OS, software that adds a secure sandbox to perform sensitive processing and cryptographic operations. “[V-OS] provides a trusted platform for mobile integrity checks, as well as cryptographic keys and data to be processed and stored in the software securely. This prevents an attacker with control of the underlying software environment to attack the mobile application,” the company explained.

The funding came from IPV Capital, an early growth venture capital firm based in China with offices in Shanghai, Beijing and Silicon Valley.