Profian, a Confidential Computing platform focused on bespoke open source solutions, announced has just secured €4.3 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Project A Ventures and Illuminate Financial, and included angel investors like Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, and Tyler McMullen, CTO of Fastly.
Founded earlier this year, Profian aims to bring cryptographic proof and verifiable trust to general computing using confidential computing, the protection of data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).
Profian was co-founded by Mike Bursell, former Chief Security Architect at Red Hat, and Nathaniel McCallum, former Virtualization Security Architect at Red Hat.
Mike Bursell, Profian’s CEO, stated: “Profian’s Confidential Computing platform will allow organizations who are currently unable to enjoy the benefits of cost savings and speed associated with public clouds — for regulatory, audit or risk management reasons — to deploy even their most sensitive data and applications in a truly hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Nathaniel and I are thrilled about the investor support we have received thus far and the team we have assembled. We look forward to launching our platform in early 2022 and engaging with the open source community.”
The fresh capital will enable Profian to develop a suite of open source products and services around Confidential Computing, a set of hardware and software technologies improving application security. Profian’s platform will be applicable across industries, but will initially focus on the financial services sector, where there is a well-defined set of use cases and a strong appetite for solutions that meet the strong confidentiality and integrity requirements.
Uwe Horstmann, General Partner at Project A, commented: “Mike and Nathaniel’s exceptional backgrounds make for an amazing pair of founders to take on this challenge. aand we believe Profian and Enarx will have the same massive impact on Confidential Computing as containers did for cloud native development.”
Profian is also a member of the Confidential Computing Consortium, a Linux Foundation project, which unites hardware vendors, cloud providers, and software developers to accelerate the adoption of Trusted Execution Environment technologies and standards.
