Venafi, Inc., a leading provider of Enterprise Encryption Management™ solutions, today announced that it has secured a $5 million Series B funding round led by Foundation Capital. Previous investors Origin Partners and UV Partners also participated in this round, which bolsters Venafi's financing to exceed $16 million in just two rounds of funding. The company will leverage the financing to expand operations and accelerate product development, marketing, sales, and customer service activities.
Leadership Team Expansion
As part of this funding, Venafi welcomes Bill Elmore, general partner of Foundation Capital, and Mark Shull, former president and CEO of Digex and MarkMonitor, to the Venafi Board of Directors. Elmore is a founding partner of Foundation Capital, a Menlo Park, California venture capital firm. Before joining Foundation Capital, he was a general partner at Inman & Bowman and held executive positions at Hewlett-Packard. He serves as a director and is past president of the Western Association for Venture Capitalists and director of the National Venture Capital Association. Shull grew revenues of Digex from $22 million in 1998 to over $214 million in 2001 and completed a successful $200 million IPO in 1999. Prior to Digex, Shull held positions at GTE Internetworking Business Solutions, BBN Planet, and EDS.
"It's unusual but satisfying to see a company in Venafi's position, with a strong customer contingency, a differentiated product, and a ripe market opportunity," said Elmore. "We're delighted to have the opportunity for a strategic series B investment in Venafi, which we believe solves one of the hardest and most expensive challenges associated with deploying encryption on a large scale."
"For an emerging technology company to be successful, it needs to be at the right place at the right time with the right solution," said Trell Rohovit, president and CEO, Venafi. "We are building our business on the premise that encryption has become a fundamental business practice, and it's an extremely rewarding experience to see leading organizations validate this vision by choosing to do business with Venafi. With the support of Foundation Capital and our new business relationship with VeriSign, we are extremely well equipped to support our increasing number of Fortune 1000 customers and leverage our first-to-market advantage to establish Venafi as the standard for Enterprise Encryption Management."