Vawlt Technologies: the first investment of AVP Tech Transfer Fund
Vawlt Technologies received a €500,000 investment from our Tech Transfer Fund. The spin-off from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon has developed a next-generation cloud storage platform that will change the approach of individuals and enterprises towards privacy.
Data privacy is one of the key topics in today’s world, since it’s a concern both for individuals, who want to have control of their data, and for companies, that want to provide value-adding services that are safe and reliable while being compliant with their customers’ privacy and gaining their trust. Today, most companies store data in the cloud. Cloud storage has many advantages and is enabling many businesses to make their IT infrastructure lighter and to innovate. But cloud storage, often relying on third-party providers, has also brought new concerns around data security, with known events of data breaches and denial-of-access that are detrimental for businesses. This is the very problem that Vawlt addresses with its cloud storage platform technology — a solution dubbed by the team a “cloud-of-clouds.”
“Our core technology makes cloud storage secure by design, aiming to eliminate the dependency on any single cloud storage provider to ensure both data privacy and business continuity.’’ says Bruno Santos Amaro, Vawlt co-founder and CEO.
This cloud-of-clouds concept, that assures security and trustworthiness, enables companies to take advantage of cloud services beyond the big players, and to use them to their advantage. Ultimately, this helps businesses customize and optimize their cloud usage by controlling parameters such as workload, geographical location of the data, performance, compliance and cost, which guarantees that the users choose the best solution for every application they need.
“Our core technology makes cloud storage secure by design, aiming to eliminate the dependency on any single cloud storage provider to ensure both data privacy and business continuity.’’
Fundamentally, Vawlt allows users to simultaneously and redundantly store each file in multiple cloud providers (private and public). With this setup, Vawlt can tolerate the arbitrary fault of any of the clouds at a given time so the users don’t even notice it. Even if one cloud is down, the users can still access the entirety of their data; even if one cloud is under attack, its data-at-risk is unreadable by any attacker.
All the files stored through Vawlt are secured with the company’s “zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption protocol”, which, in simple terms, means that only the data owners can access their files, which are encrypted every step of the way. “Neither Vawlt.io nor any other player involved nor an unwanted third-party, such as a hacker, can access the stored data.” Adds Bruno Santos Amaro.
Although the “cloud-of-clouds” concept is something new on the market, Vawlt’s CEO and co- founder points out that one of the key differences between Vawlt’s solution and its competitors is security related. “There are still players and solutions that don’t meet basic security criteria for today’s world, and therefore we clearly position ourselves to meet such criteria.” On top of that, Vawlt gives companies the power to find and manage “the best solution to their specific needs when it comes to data storage, in a single platform, with a single login, generating a single bill. This is possible because we de-risk their strategy by splitting the data through different providers with our ‘cloud-of-clouds’ technology”, adds the cofounder.
“The capital will allow us to finish product development, to test it by running pilots with selected companies, and then launch it publicly.”
The newly funded startup first started to bloom in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon, with several European-funded research and development (R&D) projects in computing and cryptography in the last decade. While in this first stage, the comments and reviews of both peers and juries, as well as suggestions from the industry, allowed the team to keep improving the underlying technology, while consciously steering the development towards early market validation. Bruno Santos Amaro also states that the academic and research background makes the team “very confident in both the solidity of the technology and its uniqueness”.
Prior to the investment, the team had already developed a test product on top of Vawlt’s technology, with which the technology was experimented and validated directly with end-users (B2C market). Now, with the 500,000 euro investment, Vawlt will fully embrace the B2B sector, where Bruno Santos Amaro believes the solutions will bring the most value. “The capital will allow us to finish product development, to test it by running pilots with selected companies, and then launch it publicly,’’ says the CEO.
The team is now aiming to launch the first public version of the B2B product in the first half of 2020. “We are focused on getting international clients from the beginning, so after publicly launching, we will focus our efforts around the acquisition of significant European clients and also starting to explore and devise a strategy for the North American market”, revealed Bruno Santos Amaro.
“A technology transfer fund managed by a professional VC is the perfect incentive for these projects to spin-off academia and totally shift their focus to a market-driven approach”
As someone who started their business as a university spin-off, Vawlt’s CEO declares that the Tech Transfer Fund is “something our ecosystem had been lacking for a long time, since there are very good R&D projects in our academic institutions, highly regarded amongst their global peers. Most of these deep-tech projects are not perfectly aligned with the objectives of more “traditional” venture capital funds, that usually look for more mature products and early traction. A technology transfer fund managed by a professional VC is the perfect incentive for these projects to spin-off from academia and totally shift their focus to a market-driven approach, by bringing on-board an investor with the experience of launching and scaling technology-based startups, the network to reach potential customers and partners and a hands-on attitude to help develop the company to fruition.”
