Our investment in Profian — securing workloads in the cloud
Profian is an open-source confidential computing startup that came out of stealth today and announced a $5m seed round, co-led by us at Illuminate Financial and Project A Ventures, with participation from angels like Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Tyler McMullen, CTO of Fastly; Till Schneidereit, Chairman of Bytecode Alliance; and Sarah Novotny, Board Member of the Linux Foundation.
Enterprise cloud migration is still in the early days…
Enterprise cloud adoption (including Financial Services) is still only scratching the surface. In fact, McKinsey estimates there is more than a trillion dollars worth of bottom-line gain (EBITDA improvement) left to be unlocked by 2030 amongst the Fortune 500. Gartner expects public cloud spending to double in the next 5 years to reach above $700bn. It’s remarkable how much value is still left on the table 15 years after AWS first launched its cloud product.
Why is the transition taking so long? The lack of trust in security meant that migration started with baby steps, moving the least sensitive data and workloads first. As corporates started to transition high-value data, the increasing number of cyber and data breaches led to a much-heightened requirement around security.
How to increase trust in cloud security? — Enter confidential computing
Confidential computing enables the protection of data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This means that even if someone has access to the hardware itself (say in a public cloud server room), they can’t look inside. Recognising the importance and appeal, hardware providers are rolling out their own versions of a solution (Intel SGX, AMD SEV, NVIDIA, ARM, etc.)
“Confidential Computing is a key security technology in the move to broader cloud adoption, and I’m excited by Profian’s open source approach to addressing this growing market.” — Jim Whitehurst, former CEO of Red Hat and Senior Advisor to IBM.
Profian helps catalyse the use of confidential computing by creating a hardware agnostic software deployment layer. It is the beginning of treating the public cloud truly like your home turf. It also means there is no need to re-write applications to use a specific (say Intel or AMD only) secure infrastructure. Profian does all the heavy lifting, offering a single layer right above the hardware. One doesn’t need to trust the cloud provider or anything else between the code that’s running and the hardware itself.
“This is going to become a hygiene factor for running cloud workloads, like HTTPS became a standard for websites” — feedback on Profian from a CTO of a major tech company
This pattern isn’t new, containerization solves a similar deployment challenge for non-sensitive workloads, but we believe Profian can catalyse driving sensitive workloads to the cloud the same way Docker or Kubernetes help make heterogeneous cloud environments easy to use and manage. The applications are endless and are already seeing interest from a plethora of industry verticals, but at Illuminate we think this is a critical solution for Financial Services and digital asset infrastructure providers.
A highly experienced team who have started building a buzzing open-source community and are already part of key industry alliances
We are excited to partner with the team behind Profian. Mike Bursell, former Chief Security Architect at Red Hat, and Nathaniel McCallum, former Virtualization Security Architect at Red Hat impressed us from the start with their wealth of expertise and vision for where they want to take the company. We look forward to connecting them to our network and supporting them through their next phase of growth.
Read more about Profian in their release or on Mike’s security blog
