Vormetric

Vormetric, founded in 2001 by Duc Pham, carved out a significant space in the enterprise data security market before its acquisition by Thales Group. The company was established in San Jose, California, and secured a total of $52.6 million in funding over six rounds to fuel its growth. A notable funding round was a Series D in June 2013, which raised $15 million. Throughout its history, Vormetric demonstrated a clear trajectory of development, culminating in its acquisition by Thales in a deal announced in October 2015 for approximately $400 million and completed in March 2016. Alan Kessler, a former HP vice president, took the helm as CEO in November 2012, leading the company through a period of growth and its eventual acquisition.

The company's core business was providing a comprehensive data security platform designed to protect data-at-rest for enterprise clients. Vormetric catered to a substantial market, including 17 of the top 25 U.S. companies, serving organizations concerned with data theft from both external hackers and internal threats. Its business model centered on the sale of software and hardware solutions for data protection. The Vormetric Data Security Platform was the centerpiece of its offerings, an integrated suite that simplified the management of data-at-rest security across an entire organization, whether on-premise, in the cloud, or within big data environments. The platform's key products included Vormetric Transparent Encryption, which provided file-level encryption and access control without altering applications, and the Vormetric Data Security Manager (DSM), a centralized appliance for managing encryption keys and access policies. This architecture allowed it to secure both structured data in databases and unstructured data in file systems, a critical feature for its large enterprise clientele. The platform also offered capabilities like tokenization, application encryption, and security intelligence logging to provide a detailed audit trail of data access. Keywords: data-at-rest security, transparent encryption, key management, access control, data protection, enterprise security, database security, file system encryption, Vormetric Data Security Platform, privileged user control, security intelligence, cloud data security, big data security, data tokenization, application encryption, data masking, data firewall, compliance, cybersecurity, Thales acquisition, Duc Pham