Atlanta, Georgia-based Ionic Security (formerly Social Fortress) has raised $40 million in series E financing led by JPMorgan Chase, with participation from an impressive cohort of existing and new investors, including Google and its venture capital arm, GV, along with Kleiner Perkins, Icon Ventures, Meritech Capital, TechOperators, Ten Eleven Ventures, Goldman Sachs, SunTrust Bank, and others. The company’s series D and B rounds totaled $40 million and $40.1 million, respectively, and Ionic formed a strategic technology partnership with Google Cloud back in 2017.
JPMorgan Chase’s Rohan Amin will join the company’s board of directors as part of the round, which brings Ionic’s total venture capital raised to $162.4 million, according to Crunchbase.
“We are humbled to expand our relationship with market leaders such as JPMorgan Chase, Google, and our existing investors to bring Ionic solutions to a broader audience with greater ease,” said CTO and founder Adam Ghetti. “From our earliest days, we have focused on building deep, trusted, and expansive relationships for the benefit of the overall security ecosystem. JPMorgan Chase and Google have demonstrated their commitment to the same ideals after years of close collaboration to create elegant solutions for the complex problems that face the entire enterprise IT landscape.”
Ionic, which emerged from stealth in 2015, offers a data-securing platform that gives admins and managers a real-time, consolidated way to view devices accessing and storing data across enterprise clouds and on-premises networks. It locks down that data using trillions of symmetric keys, which come in AES-256 cryptographic sets: Decrypting a file requires multiple keys. Naturally, anyone not in possession of every key — for instance, a malicious actor who manages to intercept a presentation or email — can’t access an Ionic-secured document without an enormous amount of time, compute resources, and willpower.
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IT teams can implement usage policies on a per-file basis and permit (or revoke) access to users (or groups of users) on the fly, from within Ionic’s cloud dashboard. Moreover, bits of data that pass through Ionic’s platform have unique IDs, timestamps, and other metadata that indicate whether they contain sensitive data — like personally identifiable information — and Ionic retains a complete record of all access requests and encryption key transactions.
Ionic’s service integrates with any PC across systems in “most” enterprise network environments, the company says. End users install a client on their devices that takes care of the encryption and decryption processes, and that’s largely the only manual configuration necessary. For customers in need of more bespoke solutions, Ionic’s software development kit enables them to add its tech to third-party apps.
“One of the toughest challenges facing enterprises today is effectively managing the security, governance, privacy, and ultimately trust, of the vast amounts of data powering large organizations,” said Amin. “Ionic Security’s data trust management [solution], along with a powerful ecosystem of partners, allows firms like ours to bring consistency and simplicity to these challenges.”
The company’s platform integrates with popular services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Storage, Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux distribution, Splunk Enterprise, Intel’s Data Guard, and more. Ionic offers managed email and cloud service solutions for Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Google Drive, and Box in partnership with data security company Titus and McAfee.
