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Irish company Accelerated Encryption Processing (AEP) has scored EUR14.5 million in new venture capital and named a new chief executive officer.
The e-security company, which is headquartered in Bray, said that its second round of funding was led by B-Business Partners; ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland, AIB Equity and existing AEP shareholders also contributed to the round. Some existing shareholders in AEP include Intel Communications Fund, Island Capital and Mentor Capital.
William Connor, AEP vice president of marketing, told ElectricNews.Net that the company will use the money to ramp up its sales and marketing, mainly in the US, and hopes to bring around 10 new workers on board following the investment. Currently the firm employs around 60 in its offices in Ireland, London, New Hampshire and California.
"Venture capitalists are very cautious these days with new investments and we see the new funding as serious validation of our technology," Connor said. He also said that the funding will see the firm through to profitability which it expects to hit in 18 to 24 months. Including the latest capital, AEP has received around EUR26.5 million in funding since it was founded in 1999.
AEP develops and sells encryption and acceleration technologies for Internet transactions. Its flagship device is a PCI card called the AEP2000 that uses the secure sockets layer protocol (SSL) to scramble and unscramble sensitive information at an incredibly high speed on servers.
Servers without encryption acceleration cards have to do a lot of complicated and time-consuming mathematics to scramble and unscramble the information. Cards like the AEP2000 are designed to speed up this process. In fact the company claims to have the fastest product of this type on the market, allowing for 2000 transactions per second. AEP also sells the AEP Shared Encryption Processor, which is designed to be shared among a group of Web server systems and allows for up to 8000 SSL transactions per second from a single box, with scalable performance of up to 256,000 SSL transactions per second.
The company also announced the appointment of Pat Donnellan as chief executive officer, who according to Connor, has been charged with leading AEP to market leadership in Internet security and acceleration. Donnellan has experience in start-ups, mergers, acquisitions and restructurings and was previously group president, international and chief operating officer of Modus Media.
Donnellan faces the task of leading AEP as it goes head to head with leaders in the market, such as Rainbow Technologies and nCipher. Both of these competitors are public firms and hold most of the market share.
But there is plenty of room for growth; the market for AEP's type of products is projected to treble in size to USD18 billion in five years according to research firm IDC.
Coinciding with Pat's appointment Chris Fairclough, founder of AEP, assumes the role of president.
For more information visit the AEP Web site.
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