sqrrl Raises $2M for Big Data Security System
sqrrl just received $2 million in seed funding from Atlas Venture and Matrix Partners. Its technology is still in the development stage, but when it officially launches, enterprises will be able to encrypt data in small portions, rather than having to hide an entire file.
sqrrl is compromised mainly of NSA veterans, including co-founders Oren Falkowitz, CEO, and Ely Kahn, who currently serves as the company’s chief operating officer.
The team is developing software based on the Apache Accumulo storage and retrieval system that will be able to single out individual components of a file or document and encrypt only that bit of data. sqrrl is targeting financial services firms and healthcare providers. But does the world need another NoSQL database? sqrrl says yes, based on the industry’s need for security, scalability and performance improvements. CEO Oren Falkowitz discusses the promise of unlocking potential behind data and opening up possibilities for applications and analytics that sqrrl provides in an interview with Wikibon founder Dave Vellante (see video below).
“For each key value pair, one of the elements of that is a visibility field that’s expressive and can be authenticated against a user’s attributes. We deploy this at the data level and this gives us a lot of flexibility…we didn’t see before.”
This cell level security is an interesting concept underlying sqrrl technology, and is a topic Falkowitz and Vellante discuss in further detail here.
Now with two million in the bank, sqrrl plans on growing its staff. The crew of seven recently relocated to Cambridge in hopes of tapping into the local analytics talent pool.
Earlier this month SpaceCurve raised $3.5 million in funding for technology that sorts out unstructured sensory and location data in such a way that enables enterprises to process it easier in traditional database environments. And shortly before that a German startup called ParStream raised $5.6 million for a DB solution that does things faster, and with very little latency.
The biggest winner by far this month was Realtime. The firm raised a massive $100 million for a platform that is aiming to be the AJAX of the big data era.
