CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari

The company’s cloud gateway encrypts customer data in real time before it’s sent to the cloud, company founder and CEO Praveen Kothari told me.  Its software appliance encrypts corporate data — using AES encryption – in Salesforce.com, Gmail,, Microsoft Office 365 and other applications — on premises before it hits the cloud. The encryption key stays with the customer, so not even the cloud provider can see the data even if it wanted to, he said.

The San Jose, Calif. company just netted $30 million in new funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and T-Systems, the venture arm of Deutsch Telekom. Those companies also participated in an earlier $1.4 million seed round.

The company has good enterprise security DNA: Kothari, was co-founder and SVP of engineering for ArcSight,the data security company HP acquired years ago for  $1.5 billion.

The new funding will be used to staff up: the company expects to double its current 130-person staff next year. A key priority will be to expand sales and marketing and its global presence. CipherCloud claims 49 major, but undisclosed, name-brand companies as users, including two of the largest 5 banks in the US.

Cloud security is a key problem to attack. Large corporations still cite security as a key hurdle to broader cloud adoption. If they can be assured that their data remains under lock-and-key even if it’s outside their data center, they can meet key compliance and regulatory hurdles.

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