US-Ukrainian startup Very Good Security raises $60M Series C

Very Good Security, which specializes in cybersecurity and compliance, has raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Vertex Ventures US with participation from existing investors, including Goldman Sachs (GS Growth) and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The news was reported to AIN.UA by Very Good Security.

The new funding will help VGS accelerate its growth. In 2020, the number of its customers was multiplied by 2.5 and its volume of data by ten.

In addition to scaling the main product, VGS is developing several new capabilities to further automate certification processes, which will make it even easier for customers to control compliance.

About Very Good Security

Very Good Security is a US-Ukrainian startup that helps businesses use sensitive information without having to deal with data security. VGS provides a specialized infrastructure for storing sensitive data, improving security while also accelerating business growth.

The company was founded in 2016. The headquarters is in San Francisco. The company’s team consists of more than 180 people, with more than half of them in Ukraine.

VGS has more than doubled the number of customers in 2020. The service processes billions of sensitive data records. At the same time, the volume of data stored in the VGS infrastructure grows by more than ten times every year.

VGS customers include Fortune100 companies as well as innovative companies like Brex, Deserve, DoNotPay, Fast, and Mercury. They all use VGS to focus on core functionality instead of compliance.

“Working with sensitive data should not require a trade-off between security and flexibility. Our customers are realizing they can finally have both. VGS is doing for data what credit cards and digital payments did for money: we have de-risked the ability to exchange the value of data, without compromising either functionality or security,” said Mahmoud Abdelkader, CEO and co-founder of Very Good Security. “Our customers can do more with their data and consistently get to market faster than those who are forced to do the heavy lifting of building and maintaining compliant infrastructure themselves.”

VGS has built an infrastructure solution that enables cloud transformation. With VGS, companies retain control of their data without having to be responsible for the data themselves or build and maintain the infrastructure to store it. The approach, called Zero Data, eliminates the need for companies to store sensitive data within their own systems, streamlining regulatory compliance and certifications, including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and others.

About Vertex Ventures US

Vertex Ventures US is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in companies transforming industries through software and data. The firm has invested in companies such as LaunchDarkly, PerimeterX, and Desktop Metal.

In Sik Rhee and Jonathan Heiliger founded Vertex Ventures US in 2015.

“VGS operates at the intersection of two multibillion-dollar markets experiencing high-growth tail winds: data security and compliance,” said Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, Vertex US. “We believe VGS is uniquely positioned with the only ‘Zero Data’ platform, making it possible for enterprises to transact with sensitive data without the liability of securing it. By encrypting and tokenizing sensitive data, VGS not only eliminates the risk associated with data, the service increases its utility by activating and presenting it on a network. Network participants, who are clients on the VGS platform, transact with each other using aliased or tokenized data. We’ve backed VGS from the beginning and are thrilled to continue partnering with the team.”