Delivering a Cloud Compliance Service

As part of the company launch, Sookasa also announced its Series A round of funding, led by top-tier venture capital firm Accel Partners, with continued participation from existing seed investors. The existing group of investors includes First Round Capital, SV Angel and other leading angel investors. The new funding will be used for continued development and to expand Sookasa’s traction in key regulated industries such as healthcare, education, legal and finance.

Cloud services such as Dropbox, Box and Gmail are powerful tools that enable easy sharing and collaboration across multiple platforms and devices. However this creates significant challenges in regulated industries because the loss of even a single device connected to a cloud account can cause a catastrophic data breach and significant legal liability. Current encryption solutions require heavy IT resources, restrict user freedom and significantly hurt user experience. With Sookasa, organizations now have a self-service turnkey encryption and compliance solution that enables their employees to safely use their favorite mobile devices and cloud services. Files are encrypted anywhere they are placed, including on the cloud, mobile devices and desktops, and remain protected even when shared externally.
“Sookasa is uniquely positioned at the junction of cloud and mobile security,” said Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel Partners, who led the investment in Sookasa. “Sookasa is the first company to consumerize compliance and make it accessible to professionals at companies of all sizes. Accel believes in scalable low-touch services that create a network effect, and Sookasa brings these principles to a market dominated by legacy appliances and packaged software. Accel is excited to partner with Sookasa to create a new model for the next generation of data security companies.”

With today’s introduction, Sookasa also announced its solution launch of the Sookasa Cloud Compliance Service™, the industry’s first solution that controls and audits file accesses across cloud services, users and devices, while enabling users to leverage their favorite cloud services and protecting files with seamless transparent encryption.

The idea for Sookasa was originally conceived by father and son researchers, Israel and Asaf Cidon, while Asaf was a PhD student in Stanford University working on cloud storage technologies. They were concerned to see that their files shared across the Atlantic were spread out to multiple cloud services and devices, without a way to centrally manage and track them. They realized that this poses an even greater challenge for businesses that have major data breach risks.

“There is a paradigm shift in the security market as content is rapidly moving from on-premise servers and desktops to cloud services and mobile devices,” said Asaf Cidon, Sookasa CEO and co-founder. “Unlike legacy security companies that protect infrastructure like networks or endpoints, Sookasa is laser-focused on protecting the content itself while preserving the user experience. Our Cloud Compliance Service is architected to operate across any cloud service, computer or mobile device.”
Sookasa was founded in 2012 in the Silicon Valley by experts in cloud security and storage. The founding team includes CEO Asaf Cidon (formerly of Google and Israeli Intelligence), Israel Cidon (formerly founder of Actona Technologies and Dean of Electrical Engineering at the Technion), Madan Gopal (formerly of Cisco and IBM), and Lior Gavish (formerly of Paypal).

The company is venture backed, with Accel leading its Series A round of funding. Sameer Gandhi from Accel Partners joins Sookasa’s board of directors with the investment. In addition, Kirk Bowman, who formerly held executive positions at VMware and Equallogic, joins as an independent board member. Advisors to the company include Taher ElGamal, CTO Security at Salesforce and the “father of SSL.”