GuardTime Raises $8 Million

GuardTime, a data integrity service provider, has raised $8 million in Series A funding. Horizons Ventures (Hong Kong) was joined by Ambient Sound Investments, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, FITOne Capital and Joi Ito.

PRESS RELEASE

GuardTime announced today that it raised $8 million in series A funding to help roll out its global infrastructure for delivering its provable data integrity service.

The company’s unique approach – a service architecture that provides independently verifiable proof of data integrity – has attracted investors including: Horizons Ventures, a Hong Kong based investment fund focusing on early stage technology companies, Ambient Sound Investments, an investment fund formed by the founding engineers of Skype, Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd (IIPL), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) that complements IDA’s industry development efforts in Singapore with equity investments, FITOne Capital, a subsidiary of FIT-One Holdings, an IT startup business incubator in Japan and Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

“For internal control, regulatory transparency and legal admissibility, businesses need to be able to prove that their data is intact,” said Mike Gault, CEO of GuardTime. “The current data integrity model involves buying expensive hardware/software from companies such as EMC, IBM, or Hitachi Data Systems, and relies on rigid and costly internal processes. With GuardTime’s solution, proof depends solely on the data itself – free from the choice of storage device, third party validation, or well kept secrets or keys.”

“Financial institutions, in particular, are under an enormous amount of pressure to strengthen internal controls,” said Benn Shepherd, CEO of JB Drax Honore, the world’s largest broker of listed European interest rate options. “With GuardTime’s solution, we can prove to our regulators, clients and auditors that data is legitimate and unaltered by insiders or outsiders – for a fraction of the cost of other solutions on the market.”

“GuardTime has the potential to transform the storage industry,” said Yukihiro Kayama, Chairman at GuardTime and a former global head of Mitsubishi’s technology business. “The trend of enterprise adoption of cloud storage will continue to accelerate and GuardTime’s solution provides an extremely cost-effective method for businesses to prove that data in the cloud is intact.”

GuardTime’s service is helping businesses across multiple industries, including financial services, government, telecommunications and healthcare, strengthening control and reducing costs.