Virgil Security
What they do: Develop application security tools.
Problem they solve: Most application developers consider security late in the development cycle, if they think about it at all.
The trouble is that unless you’re a dedicated security pro, application security is too hard, too expensive, and too prone to failure to tackle on your own. Yet, security threats continue to mount by the day.
How they solve it: Virgil’s security toolkit provides password-free authentication, strong encryption, and verification of data, devices, and identities. Virgil CEO Michael W. Wellman argues that these capabilities can be quickly and easily integrated into apps – “often in just hours and with no prior cryptographic knowledge or training required.”
Big50-2017 startup Virgil Security helps app developers add end-to-end encryption in as little as 15 minutes. http://wp.me/p330ZZ-jb Click To TweetVirgil’s application-level security platform delivers these capabilities via a cloud-based service in combination with open-source libraries that are available for desktop, embedded, mobile, and cloud/web applications with support for a wide variety of modern programming languages.
“It took WhatsApp 3 years and 15 software developers to add end-to-end encryption to their product; some of our clients are adding end-to-end encryption to their Twilio-based chat applications in 15 minutes,” Wellman said.
Headquarters: Manassas, VA
CEO: Michael W. Wellman, who previously served in the Office of the CTO for Proxim.com, and Director of Platform and Software Engineering for the DARPA XG Program.
Year Founded: 2014
Funding: Virgil is backed by $4.8 million in VC funding. Their most recent round was a $4M Series A that closed in October 2016. The round was led by KEC Ventures and joined by Bloomberg Beta, NextGen Venture Partners, and Baltimore Angels.
Competitors include: OpenPGP, OpenSSL, PolarSSL (now ARM mBed TLS), Keybase.io, Entrust, Mocano, and SafeNet (Gemalto). Virgil could also compete against security-as-a-service providers, such as Cybric. For now, this space is still in the land-grab phase.
Customers include: Twilio, Soraa, Sikka Software, ING, Yubico, and Trustlook.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: Here at Startup50, we consider any tool that helps bake security in at the app level (or below) worth a look. In the Big50-2017 competition, Virgil Security did well in online voting and the content challenge. They’ve also landed several reference customers, something security startups tend to have trouble doing.
