Skiff Banks $10.5M for E2E Encrypted Workplace Collaboration
Sequoia Capital has doubled down on its early-stage investment in Skiff, a startup building a security-themed, end-to-end encrypted workspace collaboration platform.
The prominent venture capital firm is leading a $10.5 million Series A investment in Skiff, betting there’s big profits to be made on “products that are fully private and where users own their own data.”
In addition to Sequoia Capital, Skiff announced a list of prominent angel investors joining the round, including John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, Gaby Goldberg, a crypto investor at TCG, and Albert Ni, from Dropbox and the Ethereum Foundation.
Skiff, based in San Francisco, California, is positioning its workspace collaboration platform as a “completely private, end-to-end encrypted workspace ideal for teams that want full control over their own data.”
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“Everything from building a personal knowledge base to writing collaborative meeting notes is done in complete privacy. No one, not even Skiff, can ever see the title, content, or description of a user’s document,” the company said.
The workspace collaboration market is currently dominated by heavyweights like Microsoft and Google but there are lingering enterprise security concerns around data storage and third-party access that could expose organizations to risk.
In addition to end-to-end encryption of all their data, Skiff said its customers would have the option to use the decentralized Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocol for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.
“Account creation and document sharing can also be completed using a decentralized, self-managed crypto identity, such as an Ethereum wallet,” Skiff said.
The company has published a white paper describing the threat model and security posture of its decentralized workspace technology.
Since its launch in 2020, Skiff has raised a total of $14.2 million.
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Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a journalist and cybersecurity strategist with more than 20 years experience covering IT security and technology trends.
Ryan has built security engagement programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and Kaspersky GReAT. He is a co-founder of Threatpost and the global SAS conference series. Ryan’s career as a journalist includes bylines at major technology publications including Ziff Davis eWEEK, CBS Interactive’s ZDNet, PCMag and PC World.
Ryan is a director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
Follow Ryan on Twitter @ryanaraine.
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