Very Good Security Closes $60 Million In Series C Funding

By Noah Long • Jan 2, 2021
  • Very Good Security — a modern standard for data security, compliance, and custodianship — announced that it raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Vertex Ventures US. These are the details.

Very Good Security — a modern standard for data security, compliance, and custodianship — announced that it raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Vertex Ventures US with participation from existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Goldman Sachs Growth (GS Growth).

This round of funding is going to support VGS’ accelerating growth as the company more than doubled its customer base in 2020. Currently, VGS now processes billions of records of sensitive data, and its data under management has grown more than 10x year-on-year.

Companies in the Fortune 100 and innovators such as Brex, Deserve, DoNotPay, Fast, and Mercury are increasingly utilizing VGS’ platform to build features instead of compliance overhead.

VGS has become a layer on top of cloud services for facilitating the secure exchange of sensitive data. For example, the banking-as-a-service platform Unit Finance uses VGS to expedite connectivity to payments networks while offloading PCI-DSS complexity. And Fivestars utilized VGS to build the largest commerce network for local businesses, delivering magical omnichannel loyalty and payments experiences.

As organizations of all sizes transition to the cloud and face growing compliance and privacy challenges, the need for tailored solutions and services has been rapidly increasing. And VGS has built the only infrastructure platform that simplifies cloud transformation by enabling companies to transfer custodianship while retaining ownership and control over sensitive data. This Zero Data approach eliminates the need for companies to store sensitive data within their own systems thus streamlining regulatory compliance and certifications including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, etc.

From its inception, VGS has focused on enabling companies to achieve their business objectives by expediting connectivity and overcoming compliance obstacles. And in addition to scaling its platform to support customer growth, VGS is developing several new capabilities to further automate compliance controls, delivering compounding efficiencies of scale to customers on its platform.

KEY QUOTES:

“Working with sensitive data should not require a trade-off between security and flexibility. Our customers are realizing they can finally have both. VGS is doing for data what credit cards and digital payments did for money: we have de-risked the ability to exchange the value of data, without compromising either functionality or security. Our customers can do more with their data and consistently get to market faster than those who are forced to do the heavy lifting of building and maintaining compliant infrastructure themselves.”

— Mahmoud Abdelkader, CEO and co-founder of Very Good Security

“VGS operates at the intersection of two multibillion-dollar markets experiencing high-growth tail winds: data security and compliance. We believe VGS is uniquely positioned with the only ‘Zero Data’ platform, making it possible for enterprises to transact with sensitive data without the liability of securing it. By encrypting and tokenizing sensitive data, VGS not only eliminates the risk associated with data, the service increases its utility by activating and presenting it on a network. Network participants, who are clients on the VGS platform, transact with each other using aliased or tokenized data. We’ve backed VGS from the beginning and are thrilled to continue partnering with the team.”

— Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, Vertex US