Sitehop, a leading provider of networking encryption solutions, has raised £5 million in seed funding. The financing was co-led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Manta Ray Ventures, with participation from Mercia Ventures, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, and founders of Event Horizon Capital and Osney Capital, among others. Strategic angels also participated in the investment. Sitehop was established in 2022 by Ben Harper and Melissa Chambers, and it produces ultra-low latency, low power, and hardware-enforced cybersecurity products for high-speed networks.
The company’s technology addresses a significant challenge in the digital era: software encryption solutions currently slow down communication networks by adding delay to the system. Infrastructure providers must choose between incurring significant additional costs by laying down extra fibre capacity to reduce the latency caused by encryption or running lines without encryption, which creates unacceptable risks for enterprises.
Melissa Chambers, the CEO of Sitehop, stated that “This investment allows us to expand globally, with sales and support engineering staff in Brazil, the US, India, and grow our Yorkshire headquarters.” The investment will also help Sitehop pursue its technology roadmap, flesh out the range of SAFE products that secure all types of data-in-motion, and develop parallel products using their world-class skill sets in cryptography and programmable hardware design.
Nick Kingsbury, of Amadeus Capital Partners, emphasised Sitehop’s flexible and scalable data encryption technology, which he believes is accessible to small and medium-sized businesses, as well as large enterprises, ensuring that there is no weak link in our defence against cyber-attacks. Lawrence Barclay, managing partner of Manta Ray Ventures, added that we need to ensure enough attention is placed on securing our data connectivity without compromising on performance and paying particular attention to energy efficiency.
Sitehop helps businesses proactively handle the escalating threat level from increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals using hardware-enforced enterprise encryption. Its SAFEblade 1100 is a highly secure alternative to software-based solutions, able to support over 4000 secure tunnels at once with an ultra-low encryption or decryption latency of less than 900 nanoseconds and at a data throughput of 100Gbps.
