Virtru: Protecting Data for an Era of Zero Trust

Written by Will Griffith and Richa Mehta

When we first met Virtru co-founders John and Will Ackerly back in 2013, we were struck by their passion to fully secure every piece of data that was leaving an enterprise’s boundaries. They recognized that security measures should not impair a user’s ability to access and utilize valuable data for optimal decision-making. Traditional IT perimeters, we believe, have now evaporated, and cyber threats continue to grow exponentially. Data breaches are accelerating. Data owners today have a better sense than ever of how their data is being used, and possibly abused, by others.

As a result, organizations and cyber security professionals around the world are beginning to embrace a fundamentally different mindset, one that is less about defending porous enterprise perimeters and more about embracing a collection of zero trust principles and technologies to help secure and protect networks, endpoint devices, identities, applications, and arguably — the most valuable asset of all — the data. As Virtru continues to define zero trust data access, ICONIQ Growth is thrilled to further deepen its partnership with the company by leading their $60 million Series C financing.

Virtru provides what we see as the world’s first simple way for individuals and organizations to protect and control sensitive data — wherever and however it might be shared. That’s precisely why we became fascinated with the vision of Virtru’s co-founders, John and Will Ackerly, who left their jobs at the White House and the NSA, respectively, to bring to market a data-centric policy control engine called Trusted Data Format (TDF).

When we originally invested in Virtru in 2018, we saw TDF as an innovative way to protect sensitive data flowing through email and file centric collaboration workflows. Today, with the rapid rise of zero trust security, we envision a collection of fascinating use cases for TDF that go well beyond email and files. Our latest investment reflects our belief that the company is well positioned to make TDF the open standard for sharing and protecting sensitive data in support of the rapidly emerging $60B Zero Trust security market.

We are proud to partner with John and Will and the entire Virtru team as they continue to forge the path for zero trust data access and protection.