PrivateCore Named Best Early-Stage Cloud Start-Up by VentureBeat

PrivateCore, Inc., a private computing company, was selected from hundreds applicants and bested four finalists to win the CloudBeat2013 Innovation Showdown competition.

It was chosen by a panel of judges from venture capital firms including General Catalyst, Norwest Venture Partners, Data Collective, SAP Ventures, Foley & Lardner LLP and Alchemist Accelerator for its full memory encryption technology which secures any application, any data, anywhere on standard x86 servers.

“You could imagine someone from a government security agency going into a data center and putting a snooping device on a server and intercepting all of the communications happening within a server,” said VentureBeat‘s Meghan Kelly and Dean Takahashi. “PrivateCore creates a software layer known as a Hypervisor that fits inside the memory of a central processing unit and encrypts the data in the memory. By encrypting memory, PrivateCore vCage makes it safe to run any application in outsourced, hosted, or cloud environments.”

PrivateCore CEO Oded Horovitz demonstrated the company’s new approach for closing the server in-memory security gap which allows service providers, enterprises and government agencies to achieve trust in otherwise untrusted outsourced and cloud environments.

Protecting data-in-use from memory attacks is a growing concern in cloud infrastructures where organizations do not control physical access to servers. Primarily because server memory contains a wealth of sensitive information in clear text, including encryption keys and intellectual property, which can be stolen and used to unlock encrypted data stores. PrivateCore’s vCage software encrypts data in use without requiring application or hardware modifications.

“Winning the CloudBeat Innovation Showdown is a huge boost for PrivateCore and further validation of our vCage software,” said Oded Horovitz, CEO, PrivateCore. “The recent disclosures surrounding the NSA Prism program have focused significant attention on cloud data breaches and how encryption keys and other sensitive data can be captured from server memory. As a result, we have seen a major spike in the number of organizations expressing interest in joining our beta program and testing vCage.”

PrivateCore was founded in 2011 by security industry veterans from the IDF, VMware and Google. The company is based in Palo Alto, CA and has received venture funding from Foundation Capital.