Very Good Security raises $60 million from blue-chip investors in a Series C round
Customer numbers have more than doubled over the last year and the amount of data that AGS protects has risen tenfold.
Very Good Security (VGS), the online security firm founded by Mahmoud Abdelkader, the former CTO at Balanced, has tapped the private markets to raise a further $60.0 million to take its total fundraising activities to an impressive $105.0 million.
In what has become a familiar story in the last quarter of 2020 the firm took advantage of investor appetite to raise the new cash in a Series C funding round led by long term investors Vertex who sit alongside Visa, Goldman Sachs and Andreessen Horowitz on VGS’s investor roster.
VGS is a data security provider and its systems provide a third party buffer between corporates and sensitive client data which it holds securely on its client’s behalf in the same way that bank might hold a customer’s valuables in its vaults or safety deposit boxes.
By compartmentalising and securely storing businesses sensitive data much of which won’t be directly relevant to their current activities. AGS allows that business to do whatever it does best leaving data security and integrity to the experts.
A simple premise but one that relies heavily on AGS’s ability to keep that data out of the hands of hackers and other undesirables. AGS also allows businesses to directly control how third parties, they work with, access their data. Something that will become increasingly important in future with the growth in open banking and other collaborative initiatives within financial services and elsewhere.
AGS services now extend to business areas such as the collection of data, secure data exchange and integration as well as storage. With applications in card issuance and payments, personal finance, identity validation, and what it calls multiplexing that is allowing its business customers to freely use their data with a variety of service providers and thus avoid “vendor lock-in”.
Data security is an increasingly important issue, and recent revelations about the hacking of highly sensitive US government agencies have only reinforced that point
AGS did not comment about the valuation that this latest fundraising round conferred on it but it did provide some insights as to how the business is performing. Customer numbers have more than doubled over the last year and the amount of data that AGS protects has risen tenfold.
Goldman Sachs Growth and Andreessen Horowitz both participated in the Series C round, the money from which will be used to accelerate growth at the data security firm. Given that there are almost 40 vacancies currently advertised on the company’s website that growth seems to be happening already.
