Enveil, a young startup based in Fulton, Md. specializing in a new cutting edge type of encryption, announced Tuesday that it raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by C5 Capital, with participation from Mastercard, Capital One Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and 1843 Capital.
Encryption is a longstanding practice at the bedrock of data security. Founded in 2016, Enveil is looking to capitalize on an emerging form of encryption known as homomorphic encryption. Still in its infancy, the technology’s advantage is that it protects data while it is in use or being processed, as opposed to only when it’s in storage or being transferred.
Homomorphic encryption is considered a ways from widespread adoption, but it’s widely seen as a game changer in data security because of its potential use cases. Firms in the financial, medical, government and other sectors can share sensitive data with partners who can analyze the data without ever having to decrypt it, which would expose it to breaches.
Enveil says that its “ZeroReveal” product line uses homomorphic encryption—which it calls the “holy grail” of encryption—to protect data in-use. Users can point the platform to a store of data and use it to run searches and analytics without decrypting it.
"Over the past three years, we’ve successfully created a market, solidified customer use cases, executed enterprise deployments, and expanded our capabilities for protecting Data in Use where it is and as it is today,” said Ellison Anne Williams, Enveil’s founder and CEO, in a statement. "We are privileged to be joined by this strong team of investors who recognize both our leading technical capabilities and the converging, cross-functional data protection requirements in this category—ZeroReveal is here to address privacy challenges on a global scale.”
The company says it will use the new funding to keep planting its seeds in the commercial and government markets, expand its product line and boost its customer support and sales teams.
Enveil announced in November that it scored a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the U.S. Air Force to explore securing the military branch’s supply chain.
While homomorphic encryption is still an emerging technology, Enveil isn’t the only company looking to leverage it. Duality Technologies, another startup working on commercializing the tech based in Newark, N.J., closed a $16 million Series A round in October, as reported by TechCrunch. And Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and several other commercial, academic and government stakeholders have been meeting regularly to set standards around the tech as it gains steam, according to CyberScoop.
