The security standards for SaaS firms are continually increasing as SaaS becomes the standard for most commercial applications. When users require their data to be sandboxed or kept in a certain geographic zone, the workload for development and security teams grows exponentially. Antimatter, which is emerging from stealth today and releasing its service into private beta, provides a unique approach to these issues. It gives SaaS organisations the cryptographic infrastructure they need to prove that a service meets their residency, governance, and tenancy criteria by encrypting data in transit, at rest, and during execution using secure enclaves.
The startup also announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A round headed by NEA, with General Catalyst and UNION Labs participating. This round included the creators of Snowflake, Okta, Dropbox, VMware, Segment, and Databricks.
Andrew Krioukov (CEO), the former founder and CEO of workplace management service Comfy (which Siemens acquired in 2018), Michael Andersen (CTO), the company’s cryptography expert who, like Krioukov, has a PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley, and Beau Trincia (VP of Design), who was also on the founding team at Comfy and spent seven years working on user experience design and products at IDEO.
During the development of Comfy, Krioukov and Trincia confronted the challenge of securing the user data of significant enterprise customers such as Microsoft, BMW, Salesforce, and SAP. “That was extremely difficult,” Krioukov stated. “It took a long time for the engineers to figure it out.” Trying to talk through all of this took a lot of sales time. It caused certain sales to be delayed—and possibly killed—for us. According to Krioukov, after speaking with Andersen, the team realised they had all of the necessary ingredients to address the problem once and for all.
At the same time, corporations are increasingly demanding more control over their data, even if it is stored by a SaaS provider, but this is extremely difficult for SaaS providers to achieve.
The data is stored in secure enclaves within Kubernetes, which Antimatter then leverages to provide hardware guarantees that the data is always encrypted, even while being processed. “This gives SaaS vendors a way to prove that their customer data is secure—to a higher standard than anyone has ever really aimed for before, because the app could be malicious, the employees could be malicious, all of these things could go wrong—and the customer data would still be provably secure,” he explained.
