Cosmian raises €4.M to establish “ubiquitous encryption” within organisations; here’s how

Paris-based Cosmian, a deeptech startup specialising in cryptography and advanced encryption technologies, announced on Monday that it has raised €4.2M in a fresh round of funding. 

The investment came from 115K, the new innovation fund of La Banque Postale, that targets fintech, insurtech and cybersecurity sectors, and Elaia Partners, one of the main European investment funds specialised in deeptech. Elaia Partners funded Cosmian in its inception round.

Guillaume Amblard (CEO of Amblard Ventures) and the family-holding company Fiblac also participated in the round.

Confidential Data Intelligence platform

Founded in 2018 by two French engineers, Sandrine Murcia and Bruno Grieder, Cosmian is a decentralised and privacy-by-design Confidential Data Intelligence platform that allows you to encrypt data and get the results of computations done on it without ever exposing the underlying data.

The French deeptech also enables businesses to safeguard the usage of critical data and apps without jeopardising the data’s security or privacy, even in the cloud. 

The data is kept encrypted even during its use, and includes access rights. In other words, with its Ubiquitous Encryption approach, Cosmian offers to protect sensitive data and confidential calculations everywhere and all the time.

The company works in close collaboration with leading European laboratories and is advised by David Pointcheval, CNRS 2021 silver medalist, and Professor Nigel Smart, who heads the COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) research group at KU Leuven University.

Currently, Cosmian’s team of 20 include researchers and developers who are experts in cryptography. The company has also established technological partnerships with key players such as Intel and Denodo, the data virtualisation leader.

Co-founder Bruno Grieder says, “Today, as the web has evolved from http to https, there is no longer a reason why data should not be systematically encrypted and therefore better protected. Moreover, as the cloud has become the infrastructure of choice for critical applications of large groups and unicorns of the new economy, the demand for security and confidentiality is stronger than ever. The objective is clear: that the cloud learns nothing, neither of the data nor of its use.”

A new platform

Besides the funding, Cosmian has also launched its Secure Computation public platform to accelerate the take-up of Confidential Computing techniques and democratise their use.

Since its inception, the company’s aim has been to develop encryption technologies that are easy to deploy and use in companies. To democratise their use, Cosmian is launching the first public Secure Computation platform for IT & Cybersecurity departments and for developers and data engineers.

You can explore the documentation on Secure Computation here.

Capital utilisation

CEO & co-founder of Cosmian, Sandrine Murcia, says, “Our Ubiquitous Encryption solutions have been validated by our first customers in the financial services, healthcare, energy and defence sectors. Our offering is unique: we provide state-of-the-art advanced cryptography in the form of easy-to-use, decentralised developer tools. This new round of funding aims to increase our development capacity and to increase our traction in the market, with critical applications that are mostly deployed by unicorns.”