Romanian co-founded US data security company raises investment from Spark Capital

PreVeil, a US-based company that provides enterprises with private and protected email and files, has received a Series A investment from Spark Capital. The investment, with an undisclosed value, comes after the company's recent launch of PreVeil Drive, which encrypts files and lets users store, share, and access them anywhere. It is the first outside investment in PreVeil. Two of its founders, Sanjeev Verma and Randy Battat, were the seed round investors.

The company’s proprietary suite of encrypted solutions was based on research by a member of PreVeil's founding team and company CTO, Romanian Raluca Ada Popa. Popa is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and a recent recipient of a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. At UC Berkeley, Popa is a co-founder of the RISELab, where she focuses on computer security. She is trying to develop a learning and analytics framework that can run on encrypted data. Popa, who comes from the central Romania city of Sibiu, received her PhD in computer security as well as two bachelor of science degrees, in computer science and in mathematics, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to the 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship, she is the recipient of an Intel Early Career Faculty Honor award, George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT CS doctoral thesis, a Google PhD Fellowship, a Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis from MIT, and a Computer Research Association (CRA) Outstanding undergraduate award. PreVeil recently welcomed to its board of directors global expert in geopolitical and cyber security admiral James Stavridis, who served as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO. PreVeil's email and document services combine end-to-end encryption, the "gold standard" for cyber security, with distributed trust that ensures no one administrator is a gateway for hackers, and finally, eliminates the need for passwords, a common security weak point in enterprises. Spark Capital is a venture capital firm that provided early stage funding for startups such as Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus, or Slack. It manages five funds with USD 3 billion under management. editor@romania-insider.com