Bromium gets $9.2M to make the cloud more secure

Bromium, a company in stealth mode that claims to be developing technology in virtualization and security, on Wednesday announced the close of its $9.2 million Series A round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

While the company is keeping mum on its product (other than to say that it will be unveiled some time in the second half of 2011), it has already attracted top engineering talent from Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, McAfee, and NVIDIA. Bromium has also drawn some heavy hitters in the VC world to its board of directors, including Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz; Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition Partners; and George Kurtz, worldwide CTO and executive vice president at McAfee.

The company provides a glimpse into its product, describing it as a solution to the nagging question of cloud security. For the large enterprise, this can be particularly troubling. With all your data tucked away in the cloud, how can you rest assured that miscreants won’t attempt to hijack your company, like the Anonymous group infamously did to PayPal, Mastercard, and others? Furthermore, the rapid evolution of consumer electronic devices, applications, and network choices pose a risk to the enterprise as more people need “anywhere, anytime” mobile access to enterprise data and applications.

Alas, Bromium is swooping in to the rescue with its claim to provide a “more trustworthy computing infrastructure.”

"Virtualization and cloud computing offer enterprises a powerful set of tools to enhance agility, manageability and availability, and enable IT infrastructure, desktops and applications to be delivered as a service. But these benefits are out of reach unless the infrastructure is secure and can be trusted," said co-founder, President, and CEO Gaurav Banga, in a statement. "Bromium has the team, the technology and the investors to enable us to deliver fundamental changes in platform security, from client to cloud."

The three co-founders, CEO Gaurav Banga, CTO Simon Crosby, and SVP of Product Ian Pratt, bring decades of experience in solving intricate IT problems. Prior to founding Bromium, Banga was the CTO and SVP of engineering at Phoenix Technologies; Crosby was the CTO of the Data Center & Cloud Division of Citrix; and Pratt was the VP of advanced products in the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.