Virtru, the email and file encryption application, announced on Monday (Aug. 22) it closed a round of venture capital funding.
The Series A round of funding, which netted the startup $29 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) and also included New Enterprise Associates, Soros Fund Management, Haystack Partners, Quadrant Capital Advisors and Blue Delta Capital. In addition to announcing the $29 million fundraising round, the company also said it has now grown to more than 4,000 customers.
According to a report, alongside the round of funding, Virtru said Wayne Jackson, CEO of Sonatype and former CEO of Sourcefire, will join the company’s board of directors. He will serve alongside BVP Partner David Cowan, who cofounded cybersecurity companies VeriSign, Good Technology and Defense.net, and Authentic8 CEO Scott Petry, who founded the email security company Postini.
While the company was launched in 2014 with an idea to bring security and privacy to everyday applications, like email, it wasn’t until recently that consumers have paid more attention to the risks online. After all, in addition to traditional malware and spyware attacks, consumers are increasingly falling victim to spoofing and ransomware attacks that hold their data hostage. But it’s not only consumers who are at risk. Business are increasingly a target for computer hackers.
Earlier this month, Oracle and its MICROS customers were getting hacked, and shortly after that, it appeared more cash register vendors were falling victim to hacks that were allegedly conducted by the same Russian organized cybercrime group. That’s according to Forbes, which said it was informed by five cash register providers of the breach. According to the report, in the last month, Cin7, ECRS, Navy Zebra, PAR Technology and Uniwell were all hacked. Forbes said the hackers found weaknesses in the point-of-sale system vendors’ servers and then went to work exploiting them. The hackers tried to steal passwords of retail customers and tried to gain access to retailers’ point-of-sale computers to access customers’ data, such as credit card information. It’s not clear if any sensitive data was stolen from the vendors.
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