Participated · Seed · May 2024

Niobium Microsystems is a Dayton-based company developing specialized chips that bring fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) into practical commercial use. Its custom silicon architecture allows data to remain encrypted even while it is being processed, offering mathematically guaranteed privacy for customers handling sensitive information. Led by CEO Kevin Yoder, the firm is currently building a production-ready application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and enhancing supporting infrastructure for pilot integrations. With offices in Portland and San Francisco, Niobium plans to broaden ecosystem enablement so partners can more readily adopt FHE-based solutions. The company recently secured more than $23 million in fresh capital to finalize its production silicon design and bolster customer-facing capabilities. Although financial performance metrics such as revenue or user count were not disclosed, the size of the latest raise underscores investor confidence in the company’s technology roadmap.

Led · Series B · Mar 2023

Hypori is a mobile access platform that enables secure virtual access to enterprise apps and data from any mobile device while preserving personal privacy. Its app never processes, stores, or transmits customer data and does not require traditional application or device management, relying on a zero-trust virtualization architecture. Hypori is used by systems integrators and regulated industries including defense, government, healthcare, and financial services. In 2024 the company expanded its sales team, won a $4.1M contract with the U.S. Air Force and Space Force and a $12M renewal with the U.S. Army, and earned FedRAMP "In Process" designation at a high impact level. With the new financing Hypori plans to accelerate adoption of zero-trust BYOD programs, scale deployments, fast-track product innovation, and broaden market reach into existing and new sectors. The company is headquartered in Reston, VA with a technology hub in Austin, TX. Hypori offers Hypori Halo, a zero-trust virtual workspace that eliminates data at rest or in transit on end-user devices. The product enables organizations to run BYOD programs while preventing data from residing on devices, reducing the risk of data loss and malware, and lowering hardware and software costs. Hypori cites deployments and customers in the Department of Defense, the defense industrial base, and commercial sectors including finance and health. The company emphasizes preserving end-user privacy and removing the edge as an attack surface. Hypori has won industry awards recognizing its secure BYOD solution and has been named a Best Place to Work. Headquartered in Reston, VA with a technology hub in Austin, TX, the company intends to use new capital to expand its position as a leading provider of zero-trust BYOD. Hypori provides an enterprise mobile security platform that protects corporate apps and data on personal devices by creating a virtual device environment. Its zero-trust approach has been forensically proven to prevent data transfer to or storage on the physical endpoint, enabling BYOD without device enrollment and reducing device-management and breach costs. Hypori enables employees to keep personal phones while the company controls the virtual device in a managed environment. The platform has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense and various Fortune 500 corporations. Hypori closed a $20 million Series A and will use proceeds to expand its platform into vertical markets including fintech and healthcare. The company is based in Austin, Texas and positions its technology to support secure remote work amid rising BYOD adoption driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypori provides virtual mobile infrastructure (VMI) solutions designed to shield enterprises from the risks of BYOD. Its Android Cloud Environment (ACE) platform, co-developed with the U.S. Department of Defense, is a mobile-first thin client that delivers remote access to virtual mobile devices running in private, public or hybrid clouds and accessible from iPads, iPhones and Android endpoints. The platform supports multiple platforms, integrates with off-the-shelf mobile apps and Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) technologies, and is positioned as a highly scalable Android-based infrastructure for commercial and public sector organizations. Hypori says its technology eliminates data-at-rest and separates personal and business personas to address security, compliance and privacy concerns. The company, founded in 2011 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, has been recognized as a finalist in the 2015 SXSW Accelerator and was invited to present in the Mobile World Congress Innovation program. Financially, Hypori has raised a total of $13.8 million after a $6.7 million Series-A1 tranche and plans to use the proceeds to ramp up commercial sales and execute an aggressive business plan targeting the growing VMI market.

Led · Equity · Dec 2018

Tangram Flex is a spinout from Galois, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, offering AI-based software development tools focused on cyber assurance and resilience for mission-critical embedded systems. Its products provide operational assurance and cyber-resilience for systems used in aircraft, missiles, and other U.S. defense platforms, enabling quick and secure reconfigurability via auto-generated software interfaces. The technology is grounded in decades of DoD-supported research and is designed to enable component reuse while providing strong guarantees of safety and behavioral correctness and producing assurance artifacts. Tangram positions its tooling to turn complex, inflexible, or outdated systems into modular, secure modern platforms and to reduce system lifecycle costs. The company is already profitable, and the new capital is intended to expedite execution of its vision to extend assurance across cyber-physical systems. While the initial focus is mission-critical military applications, Tangram plans to apply the same safety and cyber assurances to commercial aircraft, autonomous vehicles, connected medical devices, and more.