Vaultree raises $12.8M to let companies more easily work with encrypted data

Several years ago, on a dairy farm in the small Irish village of Dundrum, four technologists — Maxim Dressler, Ryan Lasmaili, Shaun Mc Brearty and Tilo Weigandt — brainstormed solutions for what they saw as a fundamental problem in data security: unencrypted text files. According to a 2016 survey commissioned by CyberArk, 40% of organizations store admin passwords in a Word document. A separate study from Entrust, published in 2021, found that only 42% of organizations use encryption to secure customer data.

Spurred by the trends (and the large addressable market), Dressler, Lasmaili, Mc Brearty and Weigandt developed software that let companies work with fully encrypted data without first needing to decrypt it. They then commercialized it, founding Vaultree, which sells access to the software in a software-as-a-service model.

“Most companies encrypt data at rest on their server, often sacrificing security for performance speeds to do so. However, when their employees, customers and partners use data in apps, it’s unencrypted and vulnerable,” CEO Lasmaili told TechCrunch via email. “Unencrypted data is shared with third-party companies, creating even more cyber vulnerabilities… We wanted to grab the problem at its root, going straight to fully encrypted data processing in live production database environments and enable a truly encrypted tomorrow.”

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