Data Protection in a Decentralized World: Social Capital’s Series A Investment in CryptoMove
At Social Capital, our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems. One of the biggest and inherently global problems for individuals and businesses alike is security. We’re all increasingly storing our most sensitive information, critical processes, and in some cases our livelihoods across a decentralized web of millions of datastores. Securing that data is not only essential to enabling the next generation of innovation, but also to protecting the billions of people who trust companies and institutions with their most sensitive information. So far, efforts to secure these systems have struggled to keep pace with the people who see cyber attacks as the biggest criminal opportunity in history, expected to be larger than the entire illicit drug trade combined.
We still haven’t fully seen the impact of the Equifax breach, which released half the country’s social security numbers, and have become almost numb to what seems to be a weekly cadence of high profile security issues. In just the first week of 2018, we saw the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities challenge major cloud vendors and hardware manufacturers. In 2017, Ransomware cost the global economy billions, and even shut down hospitals and froze global shipping. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the spear. By 2021, projected costs of cybercrime could be $6 trillion.
Security, and especially enterprise security, is a hard problem the team at Social Capital has been paying attention to for awhile. We’ve invested in exceptional companies like Netskope and OneLogin that have empowered businesses to re-establish control over both identity management and application and infrastructure access management as they move their core workflows to the cloud. Over the last five years, these products and their peers have become essential for every enterprise.
The move to cloud has created similar challenges and opportunities for data protection. Distributed computing, third party collaboration, edge computing, private blockchains, and connected device proliferation have scattered enterprise data and crown jewels across millions of datastores, making control more and more difficult. Today, governments and large enterprises defend infrastructure with a suite of threat detection, honeypots, access control, firewalls, behavioral analysis, AI, ML, and more to combat this reality. However, crown jewel data itself is centralized, brittle, and unchanging — ‘at rest.’ And as we see weekly, protecting unused data at rest in static systems does not scale in this new world of distributed and decentralized infrastructure.
This dynamic is driven by a fundamental and devastating asymmetry in the fight to stay ahead of attackers. Attackers are a decentralized and moving target: difficult to find, detect, and stop. Defenses, meanwhile, are a centralized and stationary target: easy to study, breach, and exfiltrate. This provides adversaries with opportunities to evade detection, study data infrastructure, and plan attacks. It’s a game rigged in favor of attackers. To even have a fighting chance, we must rethink security strategy itself.
That’s why we at Social Capital are so excited about leading the Series A investment in CryptoMove.
CryptoMove is re-engineering data protection from the ground up — building a platform for data protection at scale via dynamic movement, fragmentation, mutation, and re-encryption. Boris, CryptoMove’s founder and CTO, invented the technology while working on a new distributed programming language, Hello. Mike, CryptoMove’s cofounder and CEO (and Boris’ son) joined to productize the technology, help build a team, and take CryptoMove to market.
After years of stealth R&D and mere months in market, CryptoMove is already helping leading enterprises in the Fortune 500 as well as federal agencies protect data with moving target defense in decentralized infrastructure. CryptoMove’s team has executed with lean resources, generating remarkable early revenue and converting pilots to recurring contracts in record time.
It’s rare to find such a talented team working on such a core problem with such a revolutionary approach. The Social Capital team is thrilled to join Boris, Mike, and the entire CryptoMove team in their mission to reimagine data protection for the decentralized data era.
