Virtru, a Washington, D.C.-based encryption and data protection firm founded in 2014, closed $29 million in Series A financing, the company said Monday.
The financing round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) with New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Soros Fund Management, Haystack Partners, Quadrant Capital Advisors, and Blue Delta Capital also participating in the round.
The company plans to use the new funding to scale international operations, build new products to protect various kinds of data, and extend both its Software Development Kits (DSKs) and Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for software developers, Virtru said.
Virtru provides email and file encryption to over 4,000 international organizations in the media, entertainment, government, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing industries. Its architecture is based on the open-source Trusted Data Format (TDF) invented by Virtru co-founder and CEO Will Ackerly. Ackerly was a former cloud security architect at the NSA.
In addition to the new financing, Wayne Jackson, CEO of Sonatype and former CEO of Sourcefire, is joining the company’s board of directors. Previous board members include BVP Partner David Cowan, co-founder of cybersecurity companies VeriSign, Good Technology and Defense.net, as well as Authentic8 CEO Scott Petry.
“With the new funding and the support of best security and privacy investors and operators in the industry, we will take our mission to more businesses, software developers and individuals around the world,” Ackerly said in a statement.
“The success of Virtru’s email and file protection offerings show that they’re setting the new standard for business privacy,” Cowan added.