Breakthrough solution helps B2B SaaS companies retain full control over customer data wherever it may reside across all apps and geographies

Antimatter, the world’s first provable data security for SaaS applications, announced its emergence from stealth along with $12M in Series A funding led by NEA with participation from General Catalyst, UNION Labs, and the founders of Snowflake, Okta, Dropbox, VMware, Segment, and Databricks. Antimatter will use this round to accelerate the hiring of its world-class engineering team as the company continues development of their full-scale infrastructure solution. Early access to this beta solution is being offered to a select group of design partners.

Antimatter—founded in 2020 by Andrew Krioukov, Michael Andersen, and Beau Trincia—is solving customer data security requirements with a bold and comprehensive new approach: a cryptographic infrastructure solution that provably guarantees data can only be accessed by customer-approved individuals, even if the app or servers are compromised. The company will have an initial focus on helping SaaS teams meet enterprise customers’ security requirements for specific regions, customer-specific servers, and restricted employee access.

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“We’re solving one of the most difficult problems we experienced as SaaS founders–one that nearly everyone we’ve spoken with has called a massive headache,” said Andrew Krioukov, Antimatter Co-founder and CEO. “We’re hearing overwhelming enthusiasm from CTOs who see our solution as a ‘holy grail’ for meeting customer data security requirements without a huge lift from their dev or DevOps teams.”

Data security is one of the most critical problems in technology, with a growing number of malicious threats and inadvertent vulnerabilities posing huge risks for companies that view their data as core to their competitive ability and reputation. For SaaS teams and their customers, it’s a perennial problem where everyone loses with an exhausting process involving a growing number of compliances and standards to meet—and ultimately lost or delayed sales.

‘Our vision is to give people and companies control over their data no matter where it is in any application, and we are making that happen by building the next primitives of identity, trust, and privacy for the future internet,” said Michael Andersen, Antimatter Co-founder and CTO.

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Antimatter built its initial prototypes on several years of research in applied cryptography and decentralized authorization at UC Berkeley where Michael Andersen and Andrew Krioukov were PhD candidates in the RISElab. Krioukov was previously the co-founder of Comfy, an IoT SaaS startup that was acquired by Siemens in 2019. Beau Trincia was a founding team member at Comfy and previously a design leader at IDEO. The three co-founders focused on the problem of customer data requirements after experiencing it first-hand as SaaS founders and then discovering a near universal frustration with this challenge from many SaaS technology leaders.

“B2B software companies are plagued by privacy concerns and their ability to safeguard customer data,” said Pete Sonsini, General Partner and Head of Enterprise Investing, NEA. “The Antimatter team has developed a truly innovative solution that enables enterprises to exercise the desired data control while maintaining flexibility and cost-efficiency.”

Greg Papadopoulos, PhD, Venture Partner, NEA continued, “The crypto tech and years of university R&D that serve as Antimatter’s foundation are a gigantic step forward for highly usable—yet provably correct—secure computing and data privacy. We’re super excited to partner with Andrew and the team as they empower companies to definitively secure customer computing and data.”

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