AlephCloud, a startup developing a new technology for managing content privacy and provenance in public clouds, has announced that it has closed a $7.5 million Series B round of financing. The funding was led by Handbag LLC, a new wave venture capital firm created by noted Silicon Valley investor and former Crosspoint general partner Seth Neiman. The new investment brings the total amount raised to $9.5 million.
AlephCloud also announced that Neiman has joined the company’s board of directors. His investing group, which provides institutional investments without the institution, is composed of VCs and CEOs who helped create much of the technology used to build Internet and data center infrastructures.
“With the advent of personal devices and data sharing in public clouds, the traditional ‘moat and citadel’ approach to content protection is broken,” said Neiman. “AlephCloud technology will redefine content and device management for the cloud era.” Last week AlephCloud was one of only six startups selected from a pool of more than 100 companies for Orange Fab, the technology accelerator program managed by Orange Silicon Valley.
According to a recent report from Gartner, Inc., “Personal cloud services are simple, available free of charge and elegantly solve sync and share problems, which is why smart-device users are adopting these services. They represent a serious security and compliance threat for an IT organization, because employees can share corporate documents with third parties, or store documents on home PCs and other personal devices, completely out of an IT organization’s control.”
“IT Consumerization, which is characterized by BYOD (bring your own device) and BYOC (bring your own cloud), is making it almost impossible for enterprises to manage the operating systems and devices that employees use to access corporate information,” said Jieming Zhu, CEO of AlephCloud. “To maintain privacy, control, and compliance, organizations must be able to protect their content wherever it resides. We have the opportunity to completely change the dynamics of trust in public clouds.”
AlephCloud was founded by Jieming Zhu and CTO Roy D’Souza. Zhu is a former Chief Technologist at HP Storage and a veteran of several successful startups including Xsigo (acquired by Oracle), LogLogic, machine data analysis for security and compliance (acquired by TIBCO), and Brocade. D’Souza was most recently architect at Microsoft Azure Trust Services, a pioneering effort to implement cryptographically enforced security with federated key management for cloud services. He was also co-founder and CTO of Mimosa Systems, an email compliance vendor acquired by Iron Mountain.
