Very Good Security Raises $8.5M In Round Of Funding

Very Good Security (VGS), a startup working to protect data, told TechCrunch on Tuesday (August 28) that it raised $8.5 million in a venture round of fundraising.

According to the website, the round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from NYCA, Vertex Ventures, Slow Ventures and PayPal’s Max Levchin. Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Rampell is joining the Very Good Security board as a result of the investment.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Co-Founder Mahmoud Abdelkader said his company stores sensitive data, exchanging it for fake numbers. When the sensitive information has to be moved or accessed, Very Good Security brings back the original information without the need for customers to change their code.

The company’s offering comes at a time when consumers aren’t trusting businesses to protect their data, making Very Good Security’s services attractive. Through the platform, consumers don’t have to worry about security and can focus on running their business instead.

“Hey! Stop doing this yourself!” Abdelkader said in the report. “Put it on VGS, and we’ll let you operate on your data as if you possess it with none of the liability.”

The secret sauce behind the company is the ability to replace data with “format preserving aliases” that keep the data private. Abdelkader said that with only 30 minutes of integration, apps can send the traffic through Very Good Software without the need to talk to the company’s sales team.

“We don’t actually see your data that you vault on VGS,” he explained. He pointed to LendUp, which uses the company’s service to issue credit card numbers that are swapped out for fake ones in LendUp’s databases. If the company gets hacked, the bad guys won’t be able to steal customer data. Real card numbers are only swapped back in when a payment is being sent to the processor.

Very Good Security makes money by charging per data record and operation. The first 500 records and 100,000 sensitive API calls are free, with clients paying $20 a month to double that and an additional $0.04 per record and $0.02 per operation. The company also offers insurance policies starting at $1 million. However, policies can be raised if need be.

For Very Good Security, protecting its company from a breach is paramount.

“I don’t sleep. I worry I’ll miss something. Are we a giant honey pot?” Abdelkader said in the report. “We’ve invested a significant amount of our money into 24/7 monitoring for intrusions.”