Polyverse has secured an additional $1 million in funding months after its last round, bringing the total amount of money raised by the Bellevue security startup to $10 million.
The new cash is basically a follow-on to the $2 million round Polyverse raised in January, CEO Alex Gounares confirmed to GeekWire. And like it did when it brought on unnamed “strategic investors” in that January round, Polyverse is not disclosing the source of the new funding.
Polyverse Linux is the company’s flagship product, and it works to combat attempts to remotely take over servers running open-source distributions of Linux like Ubuntu or Fedora by creating a slightly different but unique build of Linux every 12 hours. This protects customers against attacks designed to exploit memory bugs — the most common type of software vulnerability — because it makes small, frequent changes to the most likely targets for those attacks within a company’s software stack.
“We’re on millions of servers now,” Gounares said in an interview. The Department of Defense is a customer, and other government agencies have expressed interest in the product, he said in January.
The company is preparing a version of the product that could help secure Windows machines, with early releases expected to arrive later this year, Gounares said. Linux servers dominate enterprise computing, but there are still lots of Windows boxes around, and a Windows version could also help companies secure desktops, he said.
Polyverse is currently profitable, which is a term not often associated with enterprise tech startups. The company now has more than 30 employees in Bellevue, and while Gounares wouldn’t rule out burning some of its cash in the future to fund expansion, for now it is funding the company with current revenue, he said.
