Ockam Raises $12.5m Series A to Build a Remote-First, High-Performance Team
Jan 12, 2022 13:01 PM -08:00
Ockam builds open-source developer-first tools for mutual authentication and end-to-end encrypted messaging between distributed applications, in any environment, anywhere… Trust Data-in-Motion.
Ockam has secured $12.5 million of Series A funding from OCV, alongside Craft Ventures, Future Ventures, SineWave Ventures, Okta Ventures, and others.
Ockam empowers development teams with the tools they need to easily build a “trust architecture” within their applications to ensure that data that moves over complex, multi-hop, multi-protocol routes is end-to-end encrypted, mutually authenticated, secure, and private.
Ockam has seen tremendous growth in developer engagement with its open source code over the past 6 months, and has become one of the fastest growing open source projects on GitHub. Developers resonate with Ockam’s open source project because it aligns with two important security trends: applications need to trust data, and developers need friendly easy-to-use tools.
Application security has historically relied upon network perimeters and intrusion detection to keep data that moves between applications secure. However as applications become ever more distributed across private, cloud, and edge environments, it has become impossible for application developers to rely upon network security, alone, to keep data-in-motion safe. This is the core principle in a Zero-Trust application architecture—applications must be responsible for data they create, or distribute, and place Zero-Trust in the network for security guarantees.
“With Ockam, the security of application data no longer implicitly depends on the defenses of every machine within the same, usually porous, network boundary,” said Mrinal Wadhwa, CTO of Ockam. “Instead, when applications connect with Ockam they can make granular authorization decisions about all incoming information and commands, ensuring that any data and communications between applications is secure and trustworthy.”
Ockam will triple the size of their engineering and product teams to tackle the next phase of Ockam’s growth. In particular, Ockam is immediately seeking a Head of Engineering, Head of Developer Experience, and a senior level Applied Cryptographer.
“Since the very earliest days of Ockam, we’ve built a community that shares our value of Trust,” said Matthew Gregory, CEO and founder of Ockam. “We’re grateful for all the support we’ve received from the open source community, our users, add-on partners, investors, and advisors. I am exceptionally excited that we are able to recruit the very best people in the world to join our team. We’re also thrilled to have Patricia Muoio (SineWave Ventures) and Arra Malekzadeh (Craft Ventures) join Maryanna Saenko (Future Ventures) and Joanna Drake (Core Ventures) on our board.”
