Calamu, an early-stage cybersecurity startup building technology to help companies recover from ransomware infections, has raised $16.5 million in venture capital funding.

The Clinton, New Jersey-based company said the Series A brings the total raised to $20 million and will be used to accelerate the team’s expansion and scale the product platform.

The new funding was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing seed investor Dell Technologies Capital.

Calamu is working on a shrewd approach to securing and protecting data by encrypting and sharding data at the source – cloud applications or local file systems – and scattering individually re-encrypted shards to cloud storage locations such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

[ ANALYSIS: Law Enforcement Blowback, Cyber Insurance Renewals Powering Anti-Ransomware Successes ]

According to Calamu, this redundant virtual storage environment (known as a data port) helps eliminate commonly exploited attack vectors because a complete data object does not exist at any location or provider.

“Keeping sensitive data out of enemy hands is a top priority for the company given the constant threat of ransomware and increased pressure from regulators. Hackers continue to breach corporate data systems, whether the data is stored in the cloud or on-premises, and have found ways to circumvent defensive tactics and cripple operations,” the company said.

Data protected with Calamu is useless to the hacker if stolen and automatically heals itself in the event of a ransomware attack,” he added.

Calamu chief executive Paul Lewis explained that the technology prevents attackers from obtaining anything of value and allows authorized users and applications to continue accessing pristine data as if nothing had happened.

[ READ: Five Key Signals From Russia’s REvil Ransomware Bust  ]

Calamu’s funding round comes as global organizations continue to battle an explosion of data extortion ransomware attacks over the past two years.

According to a new advisory released this week by the US government’s cybersecurity response agency CISA, ransomware continues to be a significant problem for government agencies and businesses of all sizes.

The agency said 14 of 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the United States were targeted by ransomware in 2020 and there is a notable observation this year that ransomware groups are now focusing on middle market targets in the States. -United.

Related: REvil Ransomware Gang Hit By Law Enforcement Hack

Related: Colonial Pipeline CEO Explains $4.4M Ransomware Payout

Related: New CISA boss unveils anti-ransomware collaboration with Big Tech

Related: Five Key Russian REvil Ransomware Bust Signals

Ryan Naraine is editor of SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a journalist and cybersecurity strategist with more than 20 years of experience in the field of computer security and technology trends. Ryan has implemented security engagement programs for major global brands including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and Kaspersky GReAT. He is co-founder of Threatpost and the SAS Global Conference Series. Ryan’s career as a journalist includes signings to major technology publications including Ziff Davis eWEEK, CBS Interactive’s ZDNet, PCMag and PC World. Ryan is a director of the non-profit organization Security Tinkerers and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
Follow Ryan on Twitter @ryanaraine.

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