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TNT Closes On $6M Series A Round
By Carolina Braunschweig
June 16, 2003 - When a corporation moves its IT department or its software development team overseas, to India or the Philippines, for example, it wants to make sure that those engineers can access the company's quality assurance database, but not its accounting records. Or, if its executive team is split between three countries, but needs the same set of sensitive financial data to make a decision, the company needs to ensure each of the managers can access the same, secure information.
That's the premise behind Trusted Network Technologies Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based company that closed its first round of venture capital financing with $6 million.
Led by Flagship Ventures' Jim Matheson, with a $3 million investment, the deal also included commitments from Boston's Charles River Ventures (CRV). The company's board of directors now includes Matheson and Austin Westerling of CRV.
Trusted Network Technologies, or TNT for short, makes a security software system that allows users into the enterprise network after authenticating his identification and the piece of hardware he's working on. TNT's system limits what network applications a single user can access and it limits the points from where he can access each application. It's like building a firewall around each application rather than building one around the entire network, Matheson says. If there is a security breach, the system will remember where the breach occurred, how it did and when.
Six customers are evaluating the product, and the company is in the earliest stages of revenue, Matheson says.
Founded a year ago by chief executive Steve Gant, and chief technology officer David Shay, the former CTO of Network Genomics Inc., the company's management team includes several security software veterans. Gant was formerly vice president of business development and systems management with Internet Security Systems Inc. Others have a background in the U.S. military. Gant was at the U.S. Naval Academy at the same time as Flagship's Matheson (but they didn't know each other at the time, Matheson says).
This round will be used to finance new additions to the company's engineering and sales teams, and to expand the system's functionality. It will also be used to create partnerships with network systems operators and security equipment developers as the company begins to target customers in the financial services, health care and defense industries.
The company will spend the next six months continuing customer trials and securing third-party evaluations of its system, so it can build a stronger revenue stream, Matheson says.
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