CipherCloud landed a bushel of cash today as it announced $50M in Series B funding to continue building its cloud security business.
The round was led by Transamerica Ventures along with Delta Partners and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and T-Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom also pitching in.
When I asked CipherCloud executives why they thought they were getting this kind of money, they didn’t really have a great answer for me, but the fact is there is still a lot of anxiety around security and the cloud and a service that purports to help secure the cloud is going to attract attention –and $50M is some serious attention.
The company has out of the box protection for Box, Office 365 and Salesforce.com offering to protect data with tough encryption and offer data loss prevention services, which addresses some of the chief concerns with the cloud. As you move sensitive data, how can you ensure your data is protected and how you can help recover it if the worst case happens and it gets lost?
And this argument is apparently going over well as CipherCloud told me they now have 3M users and they count among their clients highly security conscious organizations including they tell me five of the top banks, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. Of course, they didn’t offer names, but you get the idea that companies who have a stake in security in the cloud are using their service.
To no great surprise, they plan to use the money to hire more employees, expand their sales and marketing efforts and open up new markets –standard stuff with a bushel of cash in pocket.
The company has been around for four years and the money they received in this round brought their total to date to $80M. Obviously, investors are convinced that this is an area worth investing in.
