Ionic Security raises $40M for the launch of its secret security platform

Ionic Security just landed $40.1 million in new funding for a document-encryption platform it has built, but details on exactly how that platform works are still sketchy.

Meritech Capital — a firm that has invested in the likes of Box, Facebook, and Salesforce — led the funding.

Founder Adam Ghetti says he has invented a new security technology that encrypts individual pieces of content — documents, emails, presentations — at the point of creation rather than the moment of transmission. So when an attacker intercepts a document you sent to a colleague, it will look like gibberish.

“We protect the data versus the vault,” says Ghetti.

That means that with Ghetti’s technology, your project is secured the moment you click “new document.” And, he says, the security layer is “entangled” (his words) with your enterprise network. aA a user you shouldn’t notice anything different once Ionic’s system is enabled.

“It’s easy to encrypt data, its hard to decrypt the right data, for the right person, for the right moment in time. Technically we solve for that,” says Ghetti.

The real advantage, Ghetti says, lies in the way Ionic Security coordinates encryption for existing enterprise network applications and devices.

Ghetti calls his security measure a platform, not a product, but he’s not willing to give me the details about how it works. Rather, he defines what makes it a platform. He says that Ionic’s security platform integrates with any device, across applications, in most enterprise network environment. He also says that when the platform eventually launches later this year, it will do so with other security companies as partners, who will have applications built for the platform.

At the moment, only six large companies have access to the platform. When it does launch to the wider public, Ghetti says he’ll do a big reveal on how the technology works. In the mean time, we’ll have to wait.

Meritech Capital led the round, along with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), which invested previously, and other existing investors, including Google Ventures, Tech Operators, and Jafco Ventures. To date the company has earned a total funding of $78.1 million. Ionic is based in Atlanta, Georgia.