About five years ago, Purandar Das received a letter from the IRS.
The agency informed him that someone had filed a tax return in his name, but it didn't seem like he was the one filing. The IRS was right. It turned out that Das' data had been stolen in a security breach, and a bad actor was trying to monetize on that data while it was still fresh.
As it happens, Das is an expert in the security field. He had spent about 10 years in CTO roles at Epsilon, MobileMessenger and Infogroup, with a particular focus on cybersecurity at Epsilon and Infogroup. But the IRS incident opened his eyes to a new aspect of cybersecurity.
"It got me thinking about how companies protected data," Das said. "You could protect the periphery, you could encrypt data at rest, but there was nothing to protect data in use."
In 2017, Das left Infogroup to pursue that problem through a new startup, Sotero. Das and a team of engineers created a data protection platform that provides field-level encryption for data in use, data at rest and data in motion across on-premise and cloud data stores—protection, Das said, that was not previously available.
"What we’ve done is approached data security from a different perspective," Das said. "We actually encrypt data and enable operations on encrypted data... Data in use can also be protected, and that closes a big gap in today’s data protection approach."
Das and his team have been operating Sotero in stealth mode for the last three years as they refined their product and began setting up partnerships. Now, it's time to bring the company into the open and establish a presence.
On Wednesday, Sotero made its official debut with the launch of its "data-security-as-a-service" platform. The Burlington-based startup also announced a $5 million seed round backed by Gutbrain Ventures, Boston Seed Capital and PBJ Capital. The round was closed last August, Das said.
With the funding, Sotero has expanded to a team of 16 and is actively hiring for technology, sales and marketing roles. Sotero is now working to expand its customer base and capitalize on its existing pipeline. The company has revenue and client targets it is aiming to meet within the next 12 months; Sotero will not look to raise a Series A round until mid-2021, despite "strong interest from a dozen or so VCs," Das said.
Sotero has set up channel partnerships in the financial, pharmaceutical and SaaS industries and currently counts Yellowbrick Data and Holley Holland among its clientele.
The startup's technology is compatible with multiple data stores, including Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Hadoop, Avalanche, Snowflake, Yellowbrick, Postgres and MongoDB. It also has integrations that make the platform usable seamlessly across applications, Das said.
"We enable privacy in terms of access management and visibility to data use," Das said. "Because we inspect every transaction, we're in a position to stop a potential breach before it happens."
