Shane Curran, founder of Evervault. Image: Conor McCabe Photography
Evervault, the infosec start-up founded by 20-year-old Dubliner Shane Curran, has secured $16m in Series A funding.
Just three years after being named winner of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE), Shane Curran has received another round of multimillion dollar funding for his start-up Evervault.
In a blog post, Curran said the business has raised $16m in Series A funding led by Index Ventures. Previous investors Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Frontline also joined the round, in addition to a number of angel investors.
Curran’s company 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.
Despite the significant windfall, Curran downplayed the announcement of funding, which will be used to both develop the company’s technology and hire additional staff.
“I’ve personally always been of the view that funding announcements and the glamour that goes with them are a complete distraction,” he wrote. “Today is no different. We are under no illusions about our progress – all we should be judged on is the execution of our ‘grand plan’.”
‘Access to true data privacy’
This plan includes distilling “what GDPR did in 99 articles down to a line of code”, according to Curran.
“There are now over 4.5bn people connected to the internet, but none of them have true data privacy,” he said.
“We’re building the API for data privacy, starting with privacy cages – allowing software developers to process your most sensitive data in a fundamentally better, simpler and secure way.”
Evervault’s roots can be traced back to Curran’s winning BTYSTE 2017 project, qCrypt, which was a quantum-secure, encrypted data storage solution with multi-jurisdictional quorum sharing.
Last October, Evervault secured $3.2m in seed funding. Curran explained how the funding deal came about at a Future Human event during this year’s BTYSTE.
Lead investor of this latest funding round, Index Ventures, recently announced that it had secured $2bn for an investment fund for tech start-ups. This would include $1.2bn to back growth rounds, in addition to $800m to support fledgling companies.
