Google Ventures and Jafco Ventures have co-led a $25.5 million investment in Ionic Security, which is developing a distributed data security platform based on encryption technologies.
Security is once again moving to the forefront of business concerns thanks to the billions that companies are spending on new resource planning, customer relationship management, and accounting tools that are offered as a service by technology companies. Couple those hosted software services with the increasingly mobile modern workforce, and chief technology officers are looking at potential breaches in security coming from everywhere.
Ionic Security’s backers, including previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, ffVenture Capital, Tech Operators, and additional new investor Webb Investment Network, believe Ionic’s distributed approach to addressing security issues can ease businesses’ concerns.
“The whole flow of data is the wrong place to try and control everything,” said Ionic’s CTO Adam Ghetti. “We have a distributed architecture that processes, analyzes and controls information without a single step-change to the user experience.”
Ionic’s executives are cagey about exactly how the company works its security magic, but Ghetti said it wouldn’t be wrong to think of the tech as working in a way similar to Bitcoin. “It’s a distributed protocol very similar to the Bitcoin philosophy. Bitcoin exists because there is a distributed set of processing resources that have to agree.”
The Atlanta-based TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield company will use the money to build out its go-to-market strategy. Ghetti said the company will significantly increase its headcount, doubling the number of employees from roughly 50 to over 100 by the end of the year.
Ionic already has over half a dozen customers using the technology in what Ghetti called the “early access stage.”
Ionic initially launched in 2011 as Social Fortress and began as a way for consumers and enterprise customers to simplify and secure data, including email, messages, photos, tweets and status updates. Over the course of 2012, the company shifted its focus to the enterprise.
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