Hungarian Tresorit Received $1.7 Milllion Investment

A technological innovation by three students and their professor may give a boost to cloud-based file sharing. The new software of Tresorit Kft, a company founded by the inventors, makes cloud-based file sharing secure by using new encryption technology.

Tresorit received a 380 million HUF investment from Euroventures IV venture capital investment fund and nine private investors.

Their aim is to become market leader among cloud based service providers using shareable encryption, mainly among small and medium sized enterprises, where there has been no reliable and secure solution available so far.

The investment was made possible by the EU Jeremie Fund and the Swiss-Hungarian Cooperation Program.

Tresorit was founded in 2011, after two years of joint research by Szilveszter Szebeni, István Lám and András Eisenberger, three IT engineering students of the Budapest Technical University (BME), together with Dr Levente Buttyán, senior lecturer of BME’s CrySyS Laboratory.

Their original research topic was encrypted file sharing using peer-to-peer file systems, designing a system which is practically undecodable. While working on this they discovered that the newly developed technology works with cloud systems as well. In the business world it is important to make these systems secure. The security issues in connection with cloud file storage are the biggest obstacle to the spreading of cloud services. The team, now with a new member, György Szilágyi, replacing Eisenberger, changed its profile and started focusing on making cloud systems more secure.

"Other similar services are just simply not that secure while they are very easy to use. We wanted to achieve the same but using complete encryption. Our technology is an excellent solution to cloud security issues," said István Lám, CEO and founder of Tresorit Kft.

Their solution, the Tresorit, is an easy-to-use, cloud-based, secure file synchronising software, designed to share confidential data of business users. The software is suitable for making shared directories in a way that the files in the directories are encrypted before uploaded and the encrypted file will get into the cloud. When downloading the file from the cloud it is decryptable only when permitted by the owner. Other users are unable to decode its contents. The special feature of Tresorit is that the encrypted contents are shareable without re-encryption and that the share is reversible.

"Tresorit is one excellent example of Hungarian innovation and talent. We are confident that the company will gain a significant international market share using our investment funding and the experience of the investor group," said Péter Tánczos, director of Euroventures and member of the supervisory committee of Tresorit.

The team of Tresorit is helped – as investors – by experienced IT experts and entrepreneurs such as Andreas Kemi, Swedish IT entrepreneur, co-founder of Scala, UCMS Group among others, early investor in LogMeln, Quinyx and Márton Szoke, founder of IndexTools acquired in 2008 by Yahoo!, who is now and active investor in IT and biotech enterprises, and Balázs Fejes, SVP, global head of financial services business unit of NYSE-listed EPAM Systems. The first two above mentioned professionals will also join the Supervisory Committee of Tresorit Kft.

In the past few months Tresorit won honored international awards and prizes, such as the Global Security Challenge European prize or the Intel Challenge Eastern-European final. They were present at several major conferences, such as the Hungarian Innovation TechShow and the InnovactForum in Reims. The professional work of István Lám has also been honored: he has won the Youth Innovation Award, the Youth Bolyai Award, the prize of the GE Foundation Scholar-Leaders and the National Scholarship.

Tresorit currently has 20 team members.

The further development of their technology may lead to its use by large companies and they are planning the development of more cloud-cryptographic solutions as well.

The company launched its public beta in Q4 2012 followed by several products in the next 12 months using its freemium pricing model (5GB for free.)

Euroventures is Central and Eastern Europe’s independent private equity and venture capital firm. Since 1989 it has invested into Hungarian companies having international ambitions more than 40 times. The firm has been managing the Co-Investment Fund of the EU JEREMIE Program, the Euroventures IV since 2010, which has an extended fund of 7,1 billion HUF after the contribution of the Swiss-Hungarian Cooperation Program. The aim of Euroventures IV Co-Investment Fund is to facilitate co-investors to invest in up-and-coming, well-managed Hungarian SMEs. The fund’s investment period ends on December 31, 2013.