Veradocs, a new data security company that purports to protect data and documents across services wherever they go, announced $14M in Series A funding today.
The round is led by Battery Ventures with additional funding from Amplify Partners and angel investors, including Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. The company also announced that Robin Daniels, who was formerly the head of enterprise marketing at Box joined the 15 person company as CMO. Daniels tells me the formal funding announcement is actually the combination of two payments. They received $4M earlier this year, and another $10M at the end of October.
It’s worth noting that the company doesn’t have an official product yet, but they are piloting their product now and expect to release it to the public early in 2015.
While you can protect a document inside Box or Syncplicity, when it goes outside the confines of the service, it gets a bit dicier. Veradocs wants to protect that document regardless of where it goes or which service you are using, which Daniels says is a very attractive proposition for law firms, medical settings or regulated industries because it will enable them total control over the document.
That means whether it’s a document, image, email or potentially any type of data, you can attach a set of policies and rules around the use of that data, presumably indicating if it can be shared or even if a screen shot can be taken of it. Users and IT can track the data wherever it goes to create an audit trail (especially useful for regulated industries) and they can revoke access instantly at any time, rendering the data unusable.
There are a number of scenarios where this could be useful. For example, sharing specifications data with a vendor for a manufacturing RFP. After choosing one vendor, you can revoke access to the specifications documents for the losing companies. Or if sending out pricing reports to your sales team, you can ensure they are using the most recent one. You can even revoke access to an email you sent.
If you’re thinking you’ve seen data protection follow documents before, you’re not wrong. We’ve seen this type of protection in several guises. In the early 2000s, it was called IRM or information rights management. The reason it failed at the time was, it forced the document to phone home outside the company firewall and at that time, most IT pros were not willing to allow a call outside their firewall. Most of the companies involved in this industry were absorbed into other companies and it remained for the most part a niche industry.
More recently Syncplicity, which EMC bought in 2012 has the ability to set document access rights and this past September Box announced a similar security feature. But Daniels says these rights only apply to data stored inside these services. The difference with Veradocs is that it doesn’t matter where the document is, what the service is or where the data travels. The rights will travel with it.
