Vawlt is the first investment of TechTransfer Fund

Vawlt, short for Vawlt Technologies, is the first investment of Armilar’s most recent fund — a Technology Transfer fund that aims to invest in seed companies looking to commercialise technology and know-how developed in research institutions, such as universities and labs. The spin-off from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon raised €500,000 to develop its product, which will allow companies to have full control and security over their data stored in a cloud of clouds.

Vawlt Technologies was founded in February 2018 by Alysson Bessani, Ricardo Mendes, Tiago Oliveira and Bruno Santos Amaro, although the research has been under development for almost a decade, with internationally acclaimed research conducted at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and financed by the European Commission. The startup developed a multicloud solution that encrypts and stores data according to users’ needs, distributing it across different public cloud storage services, such as the ones provided by Amazon and Microsoft. Prior to the investment, Vawlt had already validated the technology through a trial version for individual use. Its plan now is to have business customers by 2020, after an intense first phase of product development. Vawlt’s product will raise the customers’ security standards for cloud data storage, with added benefits such as an increased level of reliability and availability of data, the elimination of cloud vendor lock-in and an improved balance between cost and performance of data storage services. (See the featured article with Vawlt’s CEO in this newsletter).