- Sookasa is a 12-person startup company which is trying to provide HIPAA and FERPA compliance to Dropbox, Gmail, and other consumer-oriented cloud services. Recently, the company received $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and other investors.
- The San Mateo, California company is focusing on medical and education industries for now to protect personal medical data and student records against unauthorized eyes.
- The company currently offers a cloud-based service that adds unique encryption and access control features to Dropbox. When users sing up for the service, a folder named “Sookasa” will be created in the Dropbox cloud storage. All the files, which are put inside this folder will be encrypted automatically. Dropbox file sharing will be integrated with advanced access control mechanisms provided by Sookasa.
- Sookasa users will get graphical console that lets them manage encryption and access to files in a central place and access can be blocked to all or specific people/device on the fly — in the case of a stolen or lost device, for example.
- Initially, Sookasa received $1.6 million in seed money from Silicon Valley Angels and First Round Capital. Accel Partners led this round with Andreessen Horowitz and participation from previous investors.
- With the new fund money, the company wants to add protection to email attachments as well as files, so the sensitive files like medical documents can be sent via Gmail, for example.
- Ncrypted Cloud,BoxCryptor and other companies already have their own solutions to encrypt the data in the cloud. The cloud storage is becoming an important market. Adding more functionalities will improve this market overall.
HIPAA -Health Insurance Portability and Accountability act
FERPA -Family Education Rights and Privacy Act