Ingrian Networks

About Ingrian Networks

Ingrian Networks was a data privacy and enterprise data protection solutions provider founded in 1999. The company was co-founded by Sanjay Beri and Roy Thiele-Sardina, who also served as CEO. Sanjay Beri, a graduate of the University of Waterloo with a background at Microsoft, co-founded Ingrian with a professor from Stanford University, where he was pursuing his master's degree. This academic and professional journey in technology and security directly shaped the company's focus on enterprise-level encryption.

The firm specialized in SSL and encryption-based solutions designed to protect sensitive data for enterprises. Its core business revolved around providing appliances and software that secured data-at-rest within corporate servers, databases, and applications. Ingrian served enterprise clients, particularly those handling sensitive information like online retailers and payment processors, who needed to safeguard data from both internal and external threats. The business model focused on selling dedicated hardware appliances, known as DataSecure platforms, and software connectors that integrated with existing enterprise systems. Revenue was generated from the sale of these platforms, with pricing for its Network-Attached Encryption (NAE) solution starting at approximately $29,995 in 2002.

Ingrian's flagship product was the DataSecure platform, a family of hardware appliances that offloaded processing-intensive cryptographic functions from company servers, ensuring application performance was not degraded. These platforms provided granular, column-level encryption for databases, centralized key management, and robust auditing and policy enforcement capabilities. A key feature was its ability to integrate seamlessly with various web servers, application servers, and databases through software connectors like the Ingrian File System Connector and a Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) provider. This allowed for the protection of both structured data, like credit card numbers in a database, and unstructured data, such as Microsoft Office documents, without requiring changes to existing applications. The company successfully raised over $37.4 million in funding from investors including American Express Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Partech.

In April 2008, Ingrian Networks was acquired by SafeNet, a major information security company, in a deal facilitated by AGC Partners. This acquisition integrated Ingrian's enterprise data protection technology into SafeNet's broader security portfolio. SafeNet itself was later acquired by Gemalto in 2014, which was subsequently purchased by Thales Group in 2019.