No hacker wants to leave digital fingerprints when attempting to steal or alter corporate data. And that's part of what gives Austin's newest cybersecurity startup ALTR an interesting edge -- it creates a blockchain-stored record of any attempt to impact data or other resources.
ALTR's platform is built on what it calls ALTRchain, which is optimized for secure data access and storage. The data is decentralized and fragmented in a private blockchain without any encryption keys or decoders. It also lets a company's security team, as well as non-technical CEOs, monitor and control data access.
On Wednesday, ALTR, which had been developed in stealth mode for about four years by a team experienced in algorithmic options trading technologies, announced it has raised $15 million in funding.
The new investments came from a variety of institutional and private sources. The startup noted that one of its angel investors is Ronin Capital CEO John Stafford III.
ALTR also announced several members of its board of advisors. Those include Mike Maples, Sr., a former executive at IBM and Microsoft; Fred Burton, former deputy chief of counterterrorism at the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service; Michael Hermus, former CTO of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; John Swainson, former CEO at CA; and Scott Able, co-founder of Spiceworks.
ALTR is led by David Sikora, a software entrepreneur and executive who helped lead ForeFront Group to become Texas' first software company to launch an initial public offering in 1995 and founded mobile app company Digby. Before joining ALTR, he was CEO of Stratfor, a global intelligence service that's based in Austin.
"Three things are necessary to restore trust around data usage," Sikora said in a news release. "It is crucial to see and understand access needs and to share this view among executives and IT so that everyone knows the truth. There also needs to be a means to cut off access when it is inappropriate or defies policy, and to protect data in a way that reduces or even eliminates the ability to steal it."
ALTR's emergence from stealth mode and $15 million in funding come at a time when Austin is increasingly highlighted as a hub for blockchain technologies. On Monday, the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas was picked as one of 17 partners in Ripple‘s new University Blockchain Research Initiative, a five-year, multi-million dollar partnership.
Meanwhile, Wanchain helped found the Austin Blockchain Collective to help advocate for expanded use of blockchain technologies and Capital Factory conducted a $100,000 blockchain challenge to provide funding to promising new startups.
