Mobile authentication startup KryptCo Inc. has raised $1.2 million in seed funding to help software developers protect their encryption keys.

The brand-new company founded this year by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, Alex Grinman and Kevin King, in conjunction with their professor, David Gifford. KryptCo offers Kryptonite, a smartphone app that is designed to allow developers to protect their private encryption keys. The round was led by Rough Draft Ventures and General Catalyst, with Slow Ventures, SV Angel and Akamai Labs also participating.

The app can be used without modifying any servers, allowing developers to secure their GitHub, AWS and Google Cloud SSH credentials without any changes to their infrastructure. It also makes it easier create an SSH key pair and store it securely.

“While every new high-profile tech company hack, like the 500 million compromised Yahoo user accounts, is due to many factors and weaknesses, one thing that is common among these attacks is that hackers get access to the ‘keys to the kingdom’ that just sit on developer machines in plain-text,” the company said in a statement. “Companies are well aware of this problem, and enforce the use of devices like Yubikey or Nitrokey, which are hardware usb devices that store these keys securely. However, these devices are expensive, complicated to configure, and require many people hours to deploy to thousands of developers.”

In contrast, the startup said, Kryptonite is easier and quicker to use, giving “developers a secure, safe and convenient place to store the developer credential, the SSH private key, on their iOS or Android phone.”

In addition to being offered for free, KyptCo is also making the source code for Krpyonite publicly available to allow it to be reviewed by other security experts, to ensure that it is indeed completely secure. Kryptonite is available to download from the Apple Appstore and Google Play.

Image: resio/Flickr