Montgomery County cybersecurity startup Myota is using its new funding to take its business-to-business data loss prevention software to market and double its team.
The Blue Bell firm recently raised $3.65 million in a Series A2 round led by PACA Ventures, a firm helmed by private equity executive Ira Lubert. Myota emerged from stealth mode in 2018. It took nearly three years to launch a pilot program, and the startup is forging ahead to get the software as a service product to clients.
The fresh funding will be used to hire more employees to commercialize Myota’s product, ensure the company is scaling properly and to support further product development, CEO Steve Wray said. The company plans to double its team of eight employees to 16 by the end of the third quarter, with a focus on hiring customer support specialists, operations/support staff and more developers.
Myota’s cloud-based SaaS product is designed to prevent enterprise data from being lost through ransomware, data breaches or other cybersecurity issues. It uses a “shred and spread” method that parses data in a way that can’t be read or used by cyber attackers — so even if a hacker gets to a company’s files, they’re unusable when stored in Myota, Wray said.
“We do not avoid an attack or blunt an attack or monitor an attack,” Wray said. “We focus on the data. It’s a data-centric approach that renders the information unusable to attackers.”
Myota did its first commercial launch in the first quarter with its first pilot clients, and it will soon launch a second version with new features, CEO Steve Wray said.
“This is a fully commercially ready product,” Wray said.
The startup is focused on pursuing clients in industries like financial services, life sciences, insurance, risk management and legal services as it launches fully into the market, Wray said. It will start with a more targeted launch in those verticals and then broaden its prospects in 2022, he said.
Myota is seeking midsized businesses as clients before moving to larger enterprise customers as it expands in the next year, Wray said. The startup will largely focus on the United States, but it does have some pilot programs with companies with a global presence. Wray declined to disclose the names of Myota’s clients or the company’s revenue projections.
He is expecting rapid growth.
“Given the applicability of the platform and the needs that exist to really avoid the cost of data loss or lack of continuity of business that comes from an attack, we don’t anticipate slow growth,” Wray said. “We, frankly, have a very favorable outlook toward the trajectory of growth of the organization in the near term.
