Andreessen Horowitz leads very nice $8.5m investment in Very Good Security
San Francisco-based data security firm Very Good Security (VGS) has raised $8.5 million via a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
“You can’t hack what isn’t there”
The funding will allow VGS to scale its core security product. NYCA, Vertex Ventures, Slow Ventures and Max Levchin also participated in the round.
By reducing or eliminating data security scope, VGS states that its customers can achieve compliance certifications (e.g. PCI, SOC2, EI3PA, HIPAA).
In a very good turn of phrase, VGS says it is built on the premise that you can’t hack what isn’t there, allowing companies to preserve the functionality of their sensitive data without having to store that data on their own systems.
According to VGS, it instead collects and stores the sensitive data in its own vaults, freeing customers from the costs and liability of building and maintaining their own compliant security systems.
When customer applications require sensitive data, VGS identifies that data in transit and swaps it – in real time – for surrogate values that retain the same functionality of the original data.
Customers include Flutterwave, a payment technology provider for pan-African commerce; Shift Payments, a card issuer; Deserve, an analytics-based firm that connects customers to credit products; and LendUp, providing loans and credit products.
VGS was founded in 2016 by Mahmoud Abdelkader and Marshall Jones. The company has raised $9.9 million in total funding to date.
