Polyverse, a Kirkland-based company founded by former AOL CTO Alex Gounares, has raised $1 million in capital to help protect companies from large-scale data breaches.
Prior to starting the company, Gounares held high-profile positions at AOL, where he was CTO, and at Microsoft, where he was a corporate vice president. Just prior to starting Polyverse, Gounares was CEO of Concurix Corporation, which he sold earlier this year to San Mateo, Calif.-based Strongloop. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Gounares’ new company is working on something entirely different than Concurix. At his last company, he was developing a monitoring service that helps developers visualize millions of lines of codes. When reached by phone, Polyverse’s VP of Product Strategy Peter Haynes explained Polyverse is developing software that helps companies protect their databases, mobile apps and websites from cyber attacks.
He said the goal is not necessarily to prevent the attack, but to limit their effectiveness by partitioning all of a company’s data, so that if an intruder does get it, he or she may only access a small number of records. Right now, hackers see a big payoff if they spend months trying to access a database, but by limiting how much information they can get, he said it doesn’t make the attack as economical.
Haynes confirmed the company has raised $1 million in capital from an undisclosed group of investors and that it would be applying some of the company’s proceeds from the Concurix sale to fund operations. Since the company is still in stealth mode, he declined to say how many employees it has, although he said they’ve recruited talent from Microsoft and Amazon.
