Services Email encryption Headquarters Washington, DC Type of business Private | Website www.virtru.com Founded 2012 | |
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Founders John Ackerly, Will Ackerly | ||
Easy gmail encryption with virtru for business
Virtru is an email encryption and digital privacy company.
Contents
Easy gmail encryption with virtru for business
History
Launched in 2012, John Ackerly is the CEO and Co-Founder of Virtru and Will Ackerly is the CTO and Co-Founder of Virtru, a digital privacy company based in Washington D.C. Prior to founding Virtru in 2012, John was responsible for privacy and technology policy at the White House National Economic Council and was the Policy and Strategic Planning Director at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Prior to founding Virtru in 2012, Will spent eight years at the National Security Agency (NSA) where he specialized in cloud analytic and security architecture — specifically protecting the agency’s in-house data transfers. During his tenure at the NSA, Will invented the Trusted Data Format (TDF).
Funding
Virtru is privately funded with investments from Bessemer Venture Partners and other private investors. Bessemer partner David Cowan, co-founder of Verisign, serves on the company’s board of directors. Authentic8 CEO, Scott Petry, who founded the email security company Postini, is also a Virtru board member.
On August 22, 2016, Virtru announced that it has closed on $29 million in Series A funding.
Overview
At the core of Virtru-enabled applications is the open source Trusted Data Format (TDF), which allows fine-grained access control for all file types and attachments, such as emails, Office files, pdfs, photos, and videos. The TDF format, invented by Virtru co-founder Will Ackerly, wraps and protects content and communicates with Virtru-enabled key stores that maintain access privileges. When a Virtru-protected message is sent, content is encrypted and secured inside a TDF wrapper. When your receiver attempts to open it, the wrapper communicates with the Virtru server to verify that the receiver is eligible to see the information. While the TDF technology is applicable to a wide variety of data security applications, Virtru has focused first on email.
Products
After a one-year beta period, Virtru released its flagship email privacy service in January 2015. The service provides simple email encryption directly within commonly used email services like Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.