Fortanix Gets $23 Million in Funding Round

Cybersecurity vendor Fortanix has closed a $23 million Series B round of funding led by Intel Capital, bringing its total funding to $31 million.

Round participants included existing investors Foundation Capital and Neotribe. In addition, Sunil Kurkure, director of Intel Capital, will join the Fortanix board of directors.

Tammy Schuring, Fortanix’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and field operations, tells Channel Partners the funding is fueling major growth in the company’s sales and partner management teams, as well as in the building of “channel-friendly solutions.”

Fortanix’s Tammy Schuring

“We will continue to evolve our Self Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) product to provide a full channel kit with focused use cases for channel partners to go after, easy-to-follow pricing, and compelling tools that will make the sales process repeatable,” she said. “These items are at the heart of what creates and drives a successful channel partner program.”

Fortanix launched its first partner program a year ago.

“The funding will create new opportunities for partners as it will broaden the reach of our message,” Schuring said. “What is more important today than protecting the world’s data? Being able to do this with easy-to-use transparent solutions has been impossible to date. Nobody doubts the data needs to be protected, it is just at what cost? Ease of use and security have been on opposing sides — one going up resulted in the other going down. At Fortanix we have removed the fulcrum such that both may rise together. New opportunities for our partners will emerge as the world becomes much more aware of the innovation Fortanix brings to the market.”

The investment will fuel the company’s rapid acceleration internationally, where it already is seeing significant revenue and growth. The funding will further Fortanix’s work with Intel and support the companies’ joint strategy of driving the ability for enterprises to more securely move data from on-premises and offsite to the cloud, while expanding Fortanix’s reach in the market.

“It is all about leverage — leverage into new geographies internationally, leverage into new accounts in those geographies,” Schuring said. “Partners are at the center of this for Fortanix. Internationally, some markets [we] operate entirely through partners and some require localization of assets whether it is around foreign language or specific regulatory requirements driving security. Internationally, partners are more than accelerators, they are the way to enter a new market quickly and successfully — and in some cases the only way to enter a new international region.”

“Intel shares Fortanix’s goal of protecting data in-use during runtime,” said Window Snyder, chief software security officer, and vice president and general manager of Intel’s platform security division. “We look forward to continued collaboration to help solve the complex data privacy challenges our customers face, leveraging hardware-based protections such as Intel SGX.”