Young Scientist winner raises €3m funding for tech start-up

Dubliner Shane Curran closed the $3.2m (€2.9m) seed investment round for his data privacy start-up, Evervault.

The heavy-hitting financiers backing the venture are led by Sequoia Capital, the giant Californian venture firm. It is unprecedented for such tech giants to partake in a seed fund based in Ireland.

The only other time that Sequoia has backed a start-up from a BT Young Scientist winner was when it invested in the payments firm Stripe, created by former winner Patrick Collison and his brother John.

Stripe has gone on to become one of the world's most valuable private companies, valued at $35bn (€31.7bn).

Another US venture behemoth, Kleiner Perkins, is also participating in the funding round, as is Dublin-based venture capital firm Frontline.

Mr Curran, who said he was "thrilled" at landing the funding, won the 2017 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition for research in cryptography and data privacy while he was still in secondary school at Terenure College.

He was featured in the 2018 Forbes '30 Under 30' for his work in security and privacy.

"The support and backing from some of the best investors in the world provides an exciting opportunity to accelerate us on our path to fundamentally re-architect how our personal data is handled.

"I believe we can start a generational shift in how we can approach these problems, by building the privacy tools necessary to support technology builders and creators. I look forward to growing our world-class team here in Dublin to work towards our mission of making data privacy simple and accessible for all," he said.

Evervault hosts a network of hardware-secured data processing 'enclaves' which allows developers to deploy their applications in privacy 'cages'. These cages allow information to be processed securely with strictly controlled access, but without changing the way that developers build their software.