California-based Baffle, a startup that aims to prevent data breaches by keeping data encrypted from production through processing, has raised $20 million in Series B funding.
Baffle was founded in 2015 to help thwart the increasing threats to enterprise assets in public and private clouds. Unlike many solutions that only encrypt data in-transit and at-rest, Baffle’s solution keeps data encrypted while it’s being processed by databases and applications through a “security mesh” that de-identifies sensitive data that it claims offers no performance impact to customers.
The startup says its goal is to make data breaches “irrelevant” by efficiently encrypting data wherever it may be, so that even if there is a security breach, the data will be unavailable and unusable by hackers.
“Most encryption is misapplied, and quite frankly, doesn’t do anything to protect your data,” the startup claims. “The protection measures that are most commonly used do nothing to protect you against modern hacks and breaches.”
Baffle supports all major cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and it’s currently used to protect more than 100 billion records in financial services, healthcare, retail, industrial IoT and government, according to the startup. The company claims it stores records belonging to the top five global financial services companies and five of the top 25 global companies.
“Securing IT infrastructure — networks, devices, databases, lakes and warehouses — is never complete. Constant change makes it impossible to adopt a zero trust security posture without protecting the data itself,” said Ameesh Divatia, co-founder and CEO of Baffle.
The startup’s Series B funding round, which comes more than three years after it secured $6 million in Series A financing, was led by new investor Celesta Capital with contributions from National Grid Partners, Lytical Ventures and Nepenthe Capital, and brings the startup’s total funding to date to $36.5 million.
Baffle, which says it has seen threefold revenue growth over the past year, tells TechCrunch that the funds will be used to help it grow to meet market demand and to invest further in product development. It also plans to double its headcount from 25 to 50 employees over the next 12 months.
“With this investment, we can meet market demand for data-centric cloud data protection that enables responsible digital information sharing and breaks the cycle of continuous data and privacy breaches,” Divatia added.
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