GuardTime, the data integrity service, has raised $8m in a Series A round.

Investment comes from Horizons Ventures; Ambient Sound Investments, the fund formed by the founding engineers of Skype; Infocomm Investments; FITOne Capital, a subsidiary of FIT-One Holdings, an IT startup business incubator in Japan; and Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

The company, founded in Estonia but headquartered in Japan, offers a service architecture that “provides independently verifiable proof of data integrity”, which is often a legal requirement on companies and financial organisations.

GuardTime will use the new funding to “help roll out its global infrastructure for delivering its provable data integrity service.”

“The current data integrity model involves buying expensive hardware/software from companies such as EMC, IBM, or Hitachi Data Systems, and relies on rigid and costly internal processes”, says Mike Gault, CEO of GuardTime. “With GuardTime’s solution, proof depends solely on the data itself – free from the choice of storage device, third party validation, or well kept secrets or keys.”

GuardTime is founded by cryptography experts Dr. Märt Saarepera and Dr. Ahto Buldas along with Joi Ito and Ambient Sound Investments.