Seclore Technology Pvt. Ltd., a Mumbai-based information security firm, has raised $12 million in a series B funding round led by Sistema Asia Fund Pte. Ltd., the venture capital (VC) unit of Russian conglomerate Sistema. Sistemas’ venture capital arm focuses on investments in technology-enabled consumer and business-oriented early-stage Indian and Southeast Asian firms. Other participants in the round were
Helion Ventures, VentureEast and private equity (PE) fund India Alternatives.
Commenting on the investment, Kirill Kozhevnikov, managing director and partner at Sistema Asia Fund Advisors, said, “In the modern, global world of cloud and mobile technology, it is extremely difficult to balance effective external collaboration with strict information usage policies. Seclore has reinvented EDRM with innovations in ease-of-use and simplified connectivity to accelerate adoption of persistent information-centric security.”
Seclore was in final talks to raise Series B funding. Earlier in its history, Seclore raised $6 million in series A funding from Helion Venture Partners and Ventureast Proactive Fund in 2013.Seclore has secured major contracts worldwide, from the likes of AstraZeneca Plc, Japanese electronics giant Panasonic, German automotive major Daimler AG, American cable company Comcast Corp., and insurance giant MetLife.
The company’s product makes it possible to secure sensitive documents, permitting senders to be in complete control of what the recipient can do with the document, even those documents mailed outside a company’s secure network. The technology enables the to prevent the recipient from printing, editing, taking screenshots, and forwarding it. The mail can also be remotely deleted from the recipient’s inbox.High profile hacking breaches in 2015, such as the e-mail hack at Sony Pictures, health insurer Anthem and Ashley Madison, a website that facilitated infidelity, have sparked demand for better security solutions to protect information.
Such demands have grown after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a series of reports on offshore accounts in Panama, held by the world’s business and political elite, in April. The source of the reports was a massive leak at Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the centre of the scandal. “The Panama Paper leak is the latest example of why organizations need Enterprise Digital Rights Management,” said Shivani Bhasin Sachdeva, managing director and chief executive officer of India Alternatives.
In an industry dominated by enterprise players like FireEye and Palo Alto Networks, Seclore has captured a valuable niche in the fast-growing information security segment. Recently, it reported annual results with 83 per cent year-over-year revenue growth fueled by enterprise demand for persistent file-centric security. “Organisations are finding that persistent, granular file-centric security is the best defense against cyber-attacks and other risks associated with the sharing of sensitive information,” shared founder and chief executive
Vishal Gupta.
