Virtru closes $60M series C financing round

Data protection company Virtru has raised $60 million in Series C funding co-led by existing investor ICONIQ Growth and new investor Foundry Capital. Other participants in the round include Tiger Global, MC2, Bessemer Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates. Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and co-founder and executive chairman of MC2, and Jon Ein, CEO of Foundry Capital, will join Virtru’s board of directors.

Virtru will use the funding round to accelerate the delivery of new products across its data protection portfolio and continue to scale with hiring across sales and marketing, research and development and customer success. To support these growth plans, Matt Howard, former CMO of Sonatype, has joined Virtru as CMO.

Interest in Zero Trust data protection (ZTDP) has surged over the past several years due to increases in the number and sophistication of cyberattacks; new risks posed by remote work; and recognition that perimeter-based security strategies are insufficient in a cloud-native world. Today, more than 7,000 organisations use Virtru to safeguard and encrypt their most sensitive data as it flows in and out of email and file-sharing platforms, SaaS applications, and cloud environments.  Virtru’s data protection solutions are built on top of the Trusted Data Format (TDF), the leading data control standard for the U.S. intelligence community and widely recognised as the gold standard for persistent and policy-based data governance.

John Ackerly, CEO of Virtru says: “An effective Zero Trust architecture requires cybersecurity professionals to embrace a fundamentally different mindset, one that’s much less about defending porous perimeters and much more about protecting sensitive data.

“Today, our innovative products enable businesses to easily respect and protect the flow of sensitive data. This latest round of investment is not only a testament to our progress thus far, but also reflects the massive opportunity to establish TDF as the open standard for Zero Trust data protection.”

Will Griffith, founding partner at ICONIQ Growth adds: "We originally invested in Virtru because we believed that the TDF was one of the most innovative approaches to protecting sensitive data flowing through enterprise workflows,“ said Will Griffith, founding partner at ICONIQ Growth. “Fast forward to today, and Virtru has now protected more than 1 billion digital assets. This latest investment reflects our strong belief that the company is well positioned to serve as the data-centric policy control plane for all things Zero Trust.”