By Allan Maurer
EXCLUSIVECHANTILLY, VA—Blue Ridge Networks, a 10-year-old computer and network security firm, has closed a $4.5 million D round. The company, which prides itself on selling products that have never had a security breach, plans to use the capital to bolster sales and marketing and roll out a new product at the end of the first quarter.
Investors include Redshift Ventures, Reston, VA, North Atlantic Capital, Portland, Maine, and Rock Maple Ventures, Wellesley, MA, and Associates Investors, LLC, Gladstone, NJ. The 48-employee company has raised a total of $19 million in funding to date.
CEO and President Michael Fumai, who joined the company in November, tells TechJournal South the company expects to be cashflow positive some time in 2007 and sustain it.
Blue Ridge Networks recently acquired its 200th customer. Clients include government agencies such as the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies, and commercial customers such as Fitch Ratings, and others in fields such as legal and healthcare. Clients in over 40 countries use their products.
In this case, the company’s secret sauce actually is a secret sauce. They’re experts at public key infrastructure, which secures information via a public key cryptography.
“We’ve been a PKI company since our founding,” says Fumai. The government just mandated that the DOD use PKI. The government realized they needed to put teeth in security. This forces them to put the right controls in place.”
Blue Ridge Network’s founders are renowned experts in cryptography and Virtual Private Network (VPN) technologies.
“Our founders, Tom Gilbert, chief technology officer, and Ken Hardwick, chief scientist, created a lot of today’s VPN technology. Ken was chosen by Network World in 2006 as an innovator to watch,” says Fumai.
Blue Ridge Network’s founders have racked up an impressive set of milestones. In 1987, they built the world’s fastest router for another company. In 1993, they developed VPN technology developed the cryptographic tunneling to the router that makes them secure. In 1994, they shipped its first BoardGuard Cyptoserver. They started Blue Ridge Networks in 1997 and continued innovations through the new century.
Mobile security
BoarderGuard has been the company’s flagship product for most of its existence, but it continues to add up-to-date security for the modern global, mobile workforce. Its software treats every device as untrusted, requiring mandatory mutual authentication. Each device must authenticate, preventing hackers from masquerading as one device or another.
“This is critically important today,” says Fumai. “People have been trying to secure wireless for years. People work in Starbucks or an airport. That’s one of the most vulnerable areas for attacks. If you send a mobile workforce out there, you want to make sure they don’t expose the enterprise just by checking email from the terminal. This security prevents that.”
Last year it created the industry’s highest capacity secure VPN device. The company also introduced a small appliance called Remote Link, about the size of a paperback book that allows a teleworker to secure converged media streaming video, email, voice. It requires no configuration on the part of the user. The same device may allow financial institutions to send data to branches securely.
In the first quarter this year, Blue Ridge Networks plans to introduce a new product called EdgeGuard.
“It’s going to put us in the end-point security market,” says Fumai. “It’s a big emerging market. It answers the concern of all enterprises to ensure they don’t let malware in. It hardens the end user device, desktops, laptops. It’s unique in locking down the device not the enterprise. We think it’s going to be a killer ap for us.”
The company operates from 11,000 square foot offices in Chantilly, which is near Dulles Airport, and another in northern New Jersey.
For more information see: www.blueridgenetworks.com
Allan Maurer can be reached at: allan@techjournalsouth.com
Southeast Venture Conference, February 29 – March 1, 2012 at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA – Where Smart Money Meets Smart People.
www.seventure.org
© 2007, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
