Announcing the $90M Series C in our quest to solve cloud security and privacy

Today, we announced a $90 million investment round led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. New investor GianLeap Capital as well as all our existing investors, Foundation Capital, Intel Capital, and Neotribe Ventures, participated in the round. In a time like this, with economic uncertainties and heightened geopolitical tensions, it’s humbling and thrilling to have the support of such strong investors and see Fortanix become the leading data security company.

When Anand and I co-founded Fortanix in 2016, cloud migration was still in its infancy, and few imagined just how distributed and multi-cloud the nature of computing would become. Similarly, while we understood the inadequacy and incompleteness of network and infrastructure security, few could envision a solution to keep data secure and private in a perimeter-less world.

What was truly needed then and is needed even more urgently now, is a data-first approach to security. Whether we use on-premises datacenters, or public clouds; whether our internally developed applications serve our financial data or avail third-party SaaS services to store sensitive data; whether we run analytics over our data or train AI models with third party data – there is only one constant to our concern for security and privacy - the data itself.

Think about it, whether we invest in firewalls to keep our network secure or update an antivirus on a laptop to keep malware away, our goal is to secure the data.

A data-first approach decouples security from the infrastructure and allows enterprises to keep their data secure—wherever it is. This decoupling was not possible with the existing technology. Hence, Fortanix pioneered a new technology, widely known as Confidential Computing today. Till date, we have more than 25 patents securing various aspects of the technology.

We have established Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM) as the industry's most powerful and comprehensive data security solution. Over the last three years, we have seen more than 500% growth in our business. More than 150 enterprises have standardized on Fortanix as their data security platform.

Our customer list includes the largest banks in five countries. Our customer obsession and attention to detail are reflected by the love and confidence our customers put in us—as evidenced by the 140% net dollar retention and 71+ CSAT score!

We continue to work hard to expand our partner ecosystem. Today, we secure data from more than 100 sources, including those databases, data lakes, data warehouses, storage systems, secrets, API keys, and more. At the same time, our incessant focus on simplifying our product has resulted in one-click wizards where, with just a single touch, customers can secure their workloads (sales pitch: contact me for a demo! 😊).

Despite the pandemic, our growth accelerated in the last two years. We now have more than 225 employees spread across the world. Our services are delivered from 15 data centers around the world, working in close proximity to large cloud providers.

While we are just getting started and we have a long way to go, I’m proud of our success so far, which is a testament to our talented team and our culture. Our corporate culture is rooted in our four core values – excellence (achieving the theoretical best results), replication (learning from each other), ownership, and employee empowerment. I truly believe our culture is exactly what would allow us to build an enduring multi-generational company.

Short of self-referential logic, there is no law of physics that requires data breaches to happen! It is, therefore, possible to create a technical framework to eliminate all the breaches. It’s possible to have a “one-click” solution that would not only discover all the sensitive data but also secure it and allow you to control data access based on identity and purpose of use, enforced by mathematical properties of encryption.

That’s what we call solving security and privacy, regardless of wherever data is. This investment is a significant milestone in that direction.

My deepest gratitude to our customers, employees, partners and investors for being there with us on this amazing journey and reposing their trust in Fortanix.