CipherCloud closes $50 million in financing

CipherCloud, a leader in cloud visibility and data protection, has announced a $50 million round of financing. Transamerica Ventures led the round, joined by Delta Partners, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and T-Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom.

CipherCloud’s portfolio quickly expanded across North America, EMEA and APAC as result of enterprise need to extend security, privacy and compliance from the on premises environment to the cloud. Major customers include five of the top 10 US banks, top healthcare providers, the largest pharmaceutical companies, global telecommunications companies, as well as some of the largest government agencies in the world. In all cases, CipherCloud’s innovative technology has successfully enabled these organisations to adopt business critical cloud applications while protecting sensitive data.

This round of funding will accelerate the company’s rapid growth, already one of the fastest in the cloud security market. The new funds will further solidify CipherCloud’s cloud security leadership by fuelling more aggressive go-to-market activities and international expansion, as well as advancing the company’s product innovation efforts to defend the cloud against an ever-growing set of cloud risks.

“We began our cloud security journey by solving the cryptographer’s dilemma – enabling the breakthrough of searchable strong encryption while preserving the operations of cloud applications,” said Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO, CipherCloud. “Since then, we continued to set new bars for the rest of the industry by bringing breadth and depth to our cloud security platform.”

Kothari continued: “Accelerating demand for our ground breaking products has propelled our rapid growth to over 500 employees while adding to our positive balance sheet. Given our significant market success this new infusion will help us execute even more aggressively to tackle existing and emerging problems in the space and grow our market share.”

“Transamerica has a very targeted focus with working and investing in innovative entrepreneurs to build category-leading companies,” said Georg Schwegler, CEO of Transamerica Ventures. “CipherCloud continues to build an amazing portfolio of cloud security solutions and is poised for superfast growth. We are very excited to work with Pravin and his team and enable CipherCloud on its rocket ship trajectory.”

“CipherCloud has established a global leadership position right at the intersection of two of the most interesting trends that we are seeing, namely the continued migration of businesses to cloud services, and the need for greater data protection required by both regulators and customers,” said Kristoff Puelinckx, Group Co-Managing Director of Delta Partners, an investment firm whose limited partners include the World Bank. “We look forward to actively supporting the management team at CipherCloud in the company’s continued growth and development.”

“Security and privacy are inhibitors that prevent organisations from adopting cloud applications, and CipherCloud solves these challenges in an elegant way,” said Andresssen partner, John M. Jack (blog post: Why Didn’t I Do This?). “Since its founding, the team continues to demonstrate smart vision and agile execution in lock step with the cloud risks mitigation their customers need. Their hockey stick growth testifies to the market demand for their products.”

CipherCloud’s leading cloud visibility and data protection platform enables businesses to accelerate their adoption of cloud applications including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office 365, ServiceNow, Box and many others while ensuring security, compliance and control of their data.

CipherCloud’s open platform delivers comprehensive visibility into all cloud applications in use and assesses their risk based on business, data and compliance criteria. It also ensures that data protection policies are enforced, prevents unauthorized user access to data and delivers data loss prevention, searchable strong encryption, tokenisation, and key management capabilities. The platform also ensures compliance and protects against data breaches and insider threats, through data and user activity analysis and anomaly detection.