Cambridge, UK-based Profian, a confidential computing platform focused on open source solutions, announced that it has secured $5M (approx €4.3M) in its Seed round of funding.
The Seed round was co-led by Project A Ventures and Illuminate Financial. The round also saw participation from Angel investors Olivier Pomel, Chief Executive Officer of Datadog, Tyler McMullen, Chief Technology Officer of Fastly, Till Schneidereit, Chairman of Bytecode Alliance, and Sarah Novotny, Board Member of the Linux Foundation.
Capital utilisation
The funds from this round will enable Profian to develop its suite of open source products and services around Confidential Computing, a set of hardware and software technologies improving application security.
The platform will be applicable across industries, but will initially focus on the financial services sector where there is a well-defined set of use cases and a strong appetite for solutions that meet strong confidentiality and integrity requirements.
Jim Whitehurst, a former CEO of Red Hat and Senior Advisor to IBM, says, “Confidential Computing is a key security technology in the move to broader cloud adoption, and I’m excited by Profian’s open-source approach to addressing this growing market.”
What is Profian?
Profian is a security company that provides products and services in the Confidential Computing space. The startup is committed to open-source software and is based on the Enarx project.
Profian was co-founded earlier this year by Mike Bursell, former Chief Security Architect at Red Hat, and Nathaniel McCallum, former Virtualisation Security Architect at Red Hat.
What is Confidential Computing?
Confidential Computing is the protection of data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This is the definition from the Confidential Computing Consortium, of which Profian is a member. TEE implementations are available from Intel (SGX) and AMD (SEV), and both Arm and IBM have announced product plans.
TEEs allow applications to run on the untrusted cloud: in other words, workloads are protected even from malicious or compromised hosts in the public Cloud, on the Edge, or on-premises. Profian will simplify the deployment of applications on TEEs, maintaining the highest security postures while allowing cross-platform, hybrid cloud solutions with minimum effort to organisations.
Security for the untrusted cloud
As corporate cyber and data breaches continue to accelerate globally, organisations need to increase their security for workloads in the cloud. This is where Profian looks to make a difference. The startup aims to bring cryptographic proof and verifiable trust to general computing using confidential computing, and the protection of data in use by performing the computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).
The company is committed to open-source software basing its products on the open-source software project Enarx, which uses WebAssembly, a portable run-time binary format supported on all the major hardware platforms – standardised by the W3C.
Enarx is a Linux Foundation project, under the Confidential Computing Consortium. Profian will act as a custodian of the Enarx project, encouraging broad industry contribution and facilitating collaboration with other projects. Enarx allows deploying applications without any rewrites from languages like Rust, C, C++, C#, Go, Java, Python, Haskell, and many more.
How is Profian different from existing solutions?
Profian will provide products and services to deploy cloud-native applications in line with established workflows, using existing languages and development tools. The company believes that customers should not need to change the languages, programming approaches, or deployment pipelines in order to benefit from Confidential Computing.
Mike Bursell explains, “Profian’s Confidential Computing platform will allow organisations who are currently unable to enjoy the benefits of cost savings and speed associated with public clouds – for regulatory, audit, or risk management reasons – to deploy even their most sensitive data and applications in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Nathaniel and I are thrilled about the investor support we have received thus far and the team we have assembled. We look forward to launching our platform in early 2022 and engaging with the open-source community.”
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