Fortanix Announces $8 Million Investment from Foundation Capital and NeoTribe for Runtime Encryption® Technology

Fortanix™ announced its $8 million Series A round today with investment from Foundation Capital and NeoTribe. In addition, Fortanix also announced the beta availability of its Self-Defending Key Management Service™ (SDKMS), the world’s first cloud service secured with Runtime Encryption® technology.

Today, organizations can secure their data at rest and in transit using technologies like transparent database encryption and TLS. In a major breakthrough, Fortanix’s Runtime Encryption® protects applications and data during computation.

Runtime Encryption® allows general-purpose computation on encrypted data without exposing sensitive data to untrusted operating systems, root users, cloud providers, or malicious insiders.

Founded by Ambuj Kumar and Anand Kashyap, Fortanix is a team of senior security technology veterans from Cryptography Research, Symantec, and Square, with more than 100 security patents and 30 published papers.

“Drawing on our years of experience in computer hardware and cryptography,” said Ambuj Kumar, co-founder of Fortanix, “we set out to create a means to protect applications directly, regardless of the trustworthiness of the computing infrastructure.” Fortanix’s Runtime Encryption® delivers on that promise, drastically reducing the attack surface of the modern software stack.

“It was apparent to us when we met Ambuj and Anand that they are exceptional founders,” said Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital. “During the year that they’ve spent incubating in our offices, they’ve vindicated our belief in them by building out the first mathematically complete, verifiable solution to the security problem.”

Kittu Kolluri, founder of NeoTribe, said “Ambuj and Anand possess unique knowledge of the industry, the problem, and the solution. There is no other company approaching the security issue like Fortanix and there is no other team as qualified to do so.”

Fortanix now offers its Self-Defending Key Management Service in beta. Secured with Intel® SGX, SDKMS is the world's first and only key management solution that is cloud agnostic, is built to scale, and provides software flexibility with hardware security module (HSM) grade security.

“With the rapid adoption of cloud platforms and cognitive services, enterprises need a consistent approach to secure their data,” said Nataraj Nagaratnam, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO, IBM Cloud Security. “Technologies like Intel SGX and TPM/TXT offer hardware-rooted security and application protection, while enabling the flexibility to build innovative security solutions.”

Customers can use Fortanix to protect their most sensitive applications, such as trading algorithms, software key managers, build servers, content delivery applications, and remote TLS terminations. Since Lending Club was founded ten years ago, it has facilitated billions of dollars in loans.

The company is collaborating with Fortanix because it believes, in the words of its CISO Brian Johnson, that “one day, all secure applications anywhere will run in the encrypted, self-defending state that Fortanix has pioneered.”

About Fortanix

Fortanix™ is the world's first provable Runtime Encryption® solution. Applications and data are completely protected from external and internal threats and all types of backdoors, whether deployed on premise or on any cloud provider. Fortanix leverages Intel® SGX, TXT, and other security technologies for provable protection and deploys in minutes without refactoring or recompiling.