Cloud startup Armor5 receives $2M in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures & Citrix Startup Accelerator

California-based Cloud startup Armor Inc, which was incorporated by a bunch of Indian-origin entrepreneurs, has received $2M in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Citrix Startup Accelerator. Trinity Ventures led the funding in the startup, which has come out of stealth mode and a beta version of the Armor5 service is now available.

"Chief information officers (CIOs) are understandably concerned with data security given the rise of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices inside their organisations. Armor5 is the first vendor to address the bring your own device (BYOD) security problem without requiring software installation on the mobile device. Its singular focus on the intersection of data security and BYOD, and its approach to solving the problem is the reason we are investing," said Fred Wang, general partner at Trinity Ventures.

The startup was founded in 2011 by Sunil Agrawal (chief technology officer), Naveen Ramaiah (VP engineering), Praveen Banoth (director of customer success) and Andrei Sheretov (principal architect). It then got on board Suresh Balasubramanian as its chief executive officer (CEO). The founders have earlier worked in companies like Motorola Mobility, Adobe Systems, Cranite Systems, Valicert, QualComm, Yahoo Inc, Symbol Technologies Inc, Covigo Inc, Nokia Mobile Phones, Cisco Systems, Netblue Inc and Microland. Agrawal and Ramaiah hold a MS degree in computer science from Iowa State University (US) while Banoth is an IIT Madras and IIM Kolkata alumnus and Sheretov holds a MS degree in computer science from Oregon State University (US).

The company is a cloud service provider that offers provide secure mobile access to enterprise data and applications. It serves enterprises, cloud solution providers and any organisation struggling to secure network access for mobile users, and offers a zero-touch, 100 per cent cloud service that accesses a client's network, virtualizes enterprise data and applications, and provisions secure and compliant access for every end user using any mobile device. The service safeguards intranet, cloud data and applications by ensuring content from these systems never actually resides on the end-users' devices.

"Our vision is to create a completely self-service, cloud-based answer to the security problems posed by today's explosive growth in enterprise mobility. We solve immediate pain in the areas of mobility, network security and regulatory compliance, and we do so in a way that provides end-users immediate access to the apps, data and content they need from the device they're using, without sacrificing data security," said Balasubramanian.

Zero touch deployment

In launching its service, the company has introduced 'zero touch' BYOD security. The service can be deployed without mobile client software installation, mobile security agents, intranet data or enterprise cloud applications ever downloaded to the end-user device, and without any configuration on the part of IT. For additional security, Armor5 offers watermarking and the disabling of downloading, forwarding and printing of documents. Additionally, using the cloud-based Armor5 dashboard, it can easily monitor and manage end-users, devices and documents.

"Armor5 has tremendous potential to complement Citrix technologies in addressing BYOD challenges. The service is ideal for CIOs who need an immediate solution to enterprise data security and compliance challenges with the growth of BYOD," said Michael Harries, senior director and chief technologist at the Citrix Startup Accelerator, which has also incubated Armor5.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)