Starting out as a hobby project of university students three years ago, Tresorit has evolved into a software house with 57 employees, which operates a Swiss administrative centre supplying more than 100 thousand users and over 10 thousand corporate customers worldwide. With their solution, any fi le can be securely stored in a remote storage with end-to-end encryption. ‘In two successive rounds, we have received a capital of 4.7 million euros from a group led by Euroventures, but we still have a long way to go if we want to catch up with our main competitors,’ says György Szilágyi, 27-year-old co-founder who is presently in charge of the coordination of a team of 30 software engineers.

Their major competitors include Dropbox and Box. What makes them different from these two strong global players and a dozen similar international solutions? Security. The user’s data is only accessible by means of a so called master key. If the master key is lost, there is no way back, for in the absence of the key, Tresorit will see nothing more than a set of unintelligible information. Recovery of lost data is only possible in the corporate version for a person duly authorised by the client. It was nearly two years ago that the company started to focus on this specific segment which has a high purchasing power, concentrating almost all its resources for this purpose. At the same time, what is probably the world’s most user-friendly encrypted fi le storage system, now running its third generation, remains available for the ordinary user.

Since more than two thirds of the total revenue derives from Swiss, US, German and British customers, a large part of the turnover is realised by the Swiss company (rather than the Hungarian one). The exact amount is a business secret, but it is somewhere around a couple of million euros. Stable operation at cash-fl ow level also allows for a third focus area. Tresorit offers its special encryption algorithm as a kind of an outsourced service. Several SMEs – including medical and fi ancial providers and legal advisers – domiciled in Boston and New York City have shown interest in the solution.