Dublin infosec start-up founded by BT Young Scientist winner bags $3.2m

16 Oct 2019

Shane Curran, CEO and founder, Evervault. Image: Conor McCabe Photography

Led by 19-year-old Shane Curran, privacy infrastructure developer Evervault has just secured major funding led by Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, Dubliner Shane Curran was named winner of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE). Now, at the age of 19, the company he founded earlier this year has secured $3.2m in seed funding.

Evervault, set up in Curran’s native Dublin, is building privacy tools for secure cloud hardware across both web and mobile applications, with the aim of taking privacy away from compliance and making it a product feature. This is deployed through ‘privacy cages’ where information can be processed securely in hardware-hardened containers with strictly controlled access, without changing the way companies build their software.

The start-up’s roots can be traced back to Curran’s winning BTYSTE project, qCrypt, which was a quantum-secure, encrypted data storage solution with multi-jurisdictional quorum sharing.

The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital with Kleiner Perkins, Frontline Ventures, SV Angel and a number of other tech investors also participating.

Tools for data privacy

“It is disappointing that the data privacy toolkit for developers is still entirely lacklustre in 2019,” said Curran, who is both founder and CEO of Evervault.

“The support and backing from some of the best investors in the world provides an exciting opportunity to accelerate us on our path to fundamentally re-architect how our personal data is handled. I’m thrilled to be on this journey and look forward to growing our world-class team here in Dublin to work towards our mission of making data privacy simple and accessible for all.”

In explaining Sequoia’s decision to invest, a partner at the venture capital firm, Stephanie Zhan, said: “Shane has a special combination of clear vision, deep thoughtfulness and insatiable curiosity.

“We are thrilled to partner with Evervault at the seed, to solve for today’s massive data breaches and build simple developer tools for data privacy.”

Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid added: “Their developer-first approach ensures that data privacy becomes part of the development fabric, instead of an afterthought left for compliance to troubleshoot.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Evervault and help build the new internet infrastructure for data privacy.”

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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