Fortanix announces record sales year, new partnerships and global expansion in 2019
Fortanix, the Runtime Encryption company, announced it had a record year in 2019, which saw sales climb 285 percent over the previous record year. Important new partnerships with Equinix, Google, IBM and Intel set the stage for both innovation and go-to-market success.
The company doubled its workforce and expanded geographically in 2019 with new offices in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to support its growing European customer base and attract engineering talent.
“We believe 2020 will mark a turning point for the industry in data protection and privacy,” said Ambuj Kumar, CEO, Fortanix.
“New privacy legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), advances in hardware for Runtime Encryption, and cloud service providers partnering with Fortanix will undoubtedly drive accelerated investment and demand for data protection and confidential computing solutions.”
Strategic partnerships
In 2019, Equinix selected the Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS), to power Equinix SmartKey HSM-as-a-service. As a result of this collaboration, Equinix SmartKey is available as a global SaaS-based key management and Hardware Security Module (HSM) service hosted on Platform Equinix, Equinix’s global interconnection and data center platform.
Users gain a solution that is backed by strong SLAs, world-class infrastructure, and connectivity from Equinix.
Fortanix also collaborated with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to integrate its new Google External Key Manager Service with the Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) to enable businesses to migrate new classes of sensitive data and applications to the public cloud.
The announcement of the new functionality at Google Next London featured PayPal demonstrating their use of the technology.
IBM Cloud Data Shield, powered by Fortanix’s Runtime Encryption® Platform, in 2019 began offering data-in-use protection for applications. With Runtime Encryption, organizations can now run data-centric workloads with security in the cloud and take advantage of the scale that the cloud provides.
Common use cases include securing data-centric workloads such as blockchain, databases, AI/machine learning, and analytics.
Fortanix secures key industry certifications and Consortium appointments
Last year, Fortanix earned the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
This achievement enables businesses to replace legacy encryption technologies, including Hardware Security Modules (HSM), with the Fortanix SDKMS encryption platform for protecting the most sensitive data in the U.S. Government, and technology, financial services, and healthcare industries.
Fortanix also became an inaugural member of the newly formed Confidential Computing Consortium, an organization created by the Linux Foundation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of technologies to protect data while in use by applications through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
Fortanix was elected to leadership positions as both the Chair of the outreach committee and General Member’s Representative to the Governing Board.
Key investors and executives join Fortanix to drive growth
Supporting this year’s continued expansion, Fortanix in early 2019 announced $23 million in Series B financing, led by new investor Intel Capital with participation by existing investors Foundation Capital and Neotribe.
The funding is being used to expand business operations as the company accelerates new product development and customer rollouts to meet growing global demand, including investments in sales and marketing.
The company also saw a significant increase in hiring last year, and expanded operations into Europe.
New key executives hired in 2019 included Chief Product and Strategy Officer Faiyaz Shahpurwala, former VP and GM for IBM Cloud; Chief Revenue Officer David Greene, former CEO of ZeroStack; VP of Marketing Seth Knox, former VP of Marketing at Agari; and VP of Customer Success Sameer Phatarpekar, former VP of Global Customer Success at Usermind.