Datacastle grabs $2M to keep mobile devices secure

Secure data protection company Datacastle has received $2 million in venture capital to help businesses keep their information safe on company-owned mobile devices.

Datacastle creates products to protect business information on mobile devices such as laptops with data backup, recovery, encryption, and data shredding if laptops are lost or stolen.

It also covers desktops that are located remotely from a company’s office.

The Seattle-based company uses its RED (resilient endpoint data) product to supplement the ability of IT departments to enforce data policies and make sure they reach compliance requirements.

RED can be managed by individuals or an IT department.

The company competes mainly against individual online backup  companies such as Iron Mountain or Symantec; encryption software  like PGP; and remote data and device tracking like LoJack from Absolute Software.

Their RED product also secures data deduplication, and is available as a hosted solution or in public cloud infrastructures such as Microsoft Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services.

RED can follow the company’s remote devices by placing a tracing agent in both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X systems.

The company has been actively expanding its business over the last year, closing distribution deals with Seagate i365, Systemax MISCO Germany, and Computerlinks.

Worries about the security of corporate information has become a major concern in recent years, especially as companies increasingly rely on mobile devices to keep their business running smoothly and around the clock.

“Businesses are coming to appreciate that they are one lost laptop away from having their own Wikileaks moment,” said Ron Faith, Datacastle president and CEO.

The latest round of funding was lead by Aussie VCs CM Capital, which invests primarily within the life science, telecommunications/IT and renewable energy industries, and Haag Limited.

So far, the company has raised around $10.3 million in three rounds of funding.