Irish data privacy software start-up evervault, founded by the 2017 BT Young Scientist winner Shane Curran, has raised $16m in Series A funding.
The new funding brings to $19m the total raised by the fledgling firm so far and will enable the company to expand its team.
"There are now over 4.5 billion people connected to the internet, but the reality is that none of them have true data privacy," said 20 year-old Mr Curran.
"Simply put, if no one builds the data privacy infrastructure for the internet, data privacy will never exist. That's why we’re building the API for data privacy — starting with the privacy cages functionality."
The round was led by Index Ventures and existing investors Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Frontline Ventures also contributed.
Last year the business raised a $3.2m seed round led by San Francisco based Sequoia, the first time it had made a seed investment in Ireland, as well as Kleiner Perkins.
Angel investors including Kevin Hartz, the co-founder of Eventbrite and Alex Stamos, the former Chief Security Officer at Facebook have also participated.
evervault’s software is based around privacy cages that allow developers to process highly sensitive data in a new way which the company claims is simple, scalable and privacy-preserving.
It is not currently publicly available but is being built with specific companies that process highly sensitive data, such as locations, bank account information, payments data and children’s data.
Shane Curran won the 53rd BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with a project which was the technological basis of what was later to become evervault.
