Cloud-based encryption software company StrongSalt said today it has raised $3 million in seed funding from Valley Capital Partners to build out its encryption platform-as-a-service offering for developers and enterprises.

Founded in 2017 in Sunnyvale, California, StrongSalt, formally named Overnest Inc., is developing an encrypted search and share protocol that offers an application programming interface platform to allow developers to “bake” privacy into existing applications and workflows.

Under the hood, StrongSalt’s platform is based on blockchain technology but is blockchain-agnostic in that it is open to both permissioned and permissionless models. The platform and its API offers a five-layer abstraction model that offers both secure and private data sharing functions served by an immutable and trustless distributed ledger.

“With the need for data privacy intensifying for companies and their customers, we have been working to crack the much bigger problem of making encryption practical, built on our encrypted search and share protocol and powered by blockchain technology,” a spokesperson for StrongSalt told SiliconANGLE.

“All data breaches today have one thing in common: the data was not encrypted. Many organizations do not ‘turn on’ encryption because of the friction and complexity it causes, rendering the data unsearchable, unsharable – and ultimately unusable,” the spokesperson explained. “StrongSalt is solving the fundamental problem of data privacy by building the world’s first always-on searchable encryption infrastructure through APIs that are simple enough for any developer to use, yet secure enough to power the world’s most demanding applications.”

As part of the deal, Steve O’Hara and Raymond Choi of Valley Capital Partners are joining the StrongSalt’s board of directors. The founder and head of StrongSalt, Ed Yu (pictured, right) was formerly the founding engineer of security firm FireEye Inc.

The company’s first main product, StrongVault, is available now for both iOS and Android. The app allows consumers to encrypt and store any sort of file on their mobile devices.

Yu spoke to SiliconANGLE theCUBE alongside at Val Bercovici of PencilDATA on security at AWS re:Inforce in June:

Photo: SiliconANGLE