Sitehop, a company building hardware-enforced network encryption, has raised £5 million in seed funding co-led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Manta Ray Ventures, with participation from Mercia Ventures via the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, Osney Capital, founders of Event Horizon Capital and other strategic angels including Rick Lazansky and Illia Polosukhin.
Sitehop addresses a problem with software encryption on communications networks: it adds delay, leaving providers choosing between extra fibre capacity to offset latency or running lines without encryption. Sitehop's flagship product, SAFEblade 1100, is a hardware alternative that can support over 4,000 secure tunnels at once with encryption or decryption latency of less than 900 nanoseconds and throughput of 100Gbps, aimed at high-bandwidth settings such as data centres, the cloud or edge computing.
The SAFE series is designed to scale by adding devices as needed, rather than processing data through a central computing platform, and Sitehop says the approach can cut the power required for encryption by up to 90%.
CEO Melissa Chambers said the investment allows Sitehop to expand sales and support engineering in Brazil, the US and India, grow its Yorkshire headquarters, add engineers and production workers, move into a new Sheffield location, and pursue its technology roadmap across the SAFE range and parallel products in cryptography and programmable hardware. Sitehop was founded in 2022 by Ben Harper and Melissa Chambers.
This investment allows us to expand our global reach, with sales and support engineering staff in Brazil, the US, India, and grow our Yorkshire headquarters. We will be adding engineers and production workers and moving into a new Sheffield location. The investment will also enable Sitehop to pursue its technology roadmap – fleshing out the range of SAFE products securing all types of data-in-motion, and developing parallel products using our world-class skillsets in cryptography and programmable hardware design. We aim to get Sitehop's products into the backbone of most of the world's networks in the next few years.
Sitehop is bringing a novel hardware-based approach to a fundamental challenge facing the providers of the essential network infrastructure underpinning our digital society. The flexibility and scalability of Sitehop's data encryption technology makes it accessible to SMEs as well as large enterprises, meaning there need be no weak link in our defence against cyber criminality.
We are really excited to partner with Melissa, Ben and the Sitehop team in the next phase of their journey. We have been incredibly impressed at how thoughtful and effective an approach they have taken to the increasingly critical challenge of network security. We are past the point of dependency on data connectivity and need to ensure enough attention is put on how it is secured without compromise on performance and with important attention to energy efficiency.
