Atombeam Inc., a startup developing a more efficient way of transmitting data, today announced that it has raised $20 million in funding.

The investment was structured as a so-called Reg A+ round. This is a type of funding round in which capital is provided by members of the public rather than institutional investors. Atombeam says that the investment included more than 6,500 participants. 

Moraga, California-based Atombeam develops a data transmission technology it dubs Data-as-Codewords. The software promises to reduce the storage footprint of files by up to 75% and thereby boost the speed at which they can be sent over the network. Moreover, Atombeam claims that its platform also improves the security of the data being transmitted.

Standard data compression tools reduce the storage footprint of files by scanning them for patterns that appear multiple times. Such patterns might include, for example, a string of letters and numbers that repeats itself several times in a document. Those duplicate copies of the string are replaced with a single copy that takes up less storage space. 

Atombeam’s Data-as-Codewords technology is based on the same basic concept, but takes it a step further. 

First, the software identifies patterns that appear multiple times in a file and consolidates the duplicate copies into a single copy. Then, it replaces those consolidated copies with placeholder data points dubbed codewords. If hackers were to compromise a file transmitted using Atombeam’s technology, they would only gain access to the codewords rather than the file’s contents. 

Codewords are assigned randomly rather than generated based on customers’ data. According to Atombeam, that means codewords can’t be reverse-engineered to obtain files they protect. The company says the technology is lossless, which means scrambling a file with Data-as-Codewords doesn’t delete any of its contents. 

Atombeam plans to commercialize the software with two products. 

The first offering, Neurpac, is a cloud service that can scramble files using Data-as-Codewords and unscramble them for users. It uses artificial intelligence to carry out the task. A gateway component allows devices to send data protected with Neurpac using various third-party network protocols.

The company sees customers applying the service to multiple use cases. Agricultural sensors integrated with Neurpac could send data to the cloud for analysis faster than would otherwise be possible, it says, and vehicles can use the service to send diagnostics information to a carmaker’s backend systems. 

Atombeam is developing its second product, Neurcom, in partnership with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The offering will initially focus on speeding up the transmission of radar images. Atombeam expects to release Neurcom in the second half of 2025.

“By reducing data size by 75% in a few millionths of a second, bandwidth can be expanded by 4x — which means companies can access more data, faster and less expensively,” said Chief Executive Officer Charles Yeomans. “By doing so, fewer energy and infrastructure resources are necessary, even while the amount of data being accessed, transmitted and used increases.”

Atombeam will use its new funding to accelerate product development and go-to-market initiatives. 

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