KoolSpan lands Samsung's security arm
Bill Flook
Staff Reporter- Washington Business Journal
Bethesda-based mobile security startup KoolSpan Inc. notched a big customer win this week: Samsung's S-1 Corp.
KoolSpan announced that S-1, the security arm of the Korean corporate behemoth, will use the Maryland company's voice/text/data-encryption chip — dubbed TrustChip — as the backbone to S-1's "SafeTalk" smartphone security offering.
The startup has raised some $20 million in venture funding, according to CrunchBase, most recently with a $5 million funding in November 2011. Shortly after that investment, KoolSpan snapped up the engineering team and some assets from SRA International Inc. At the time, CEO Gregg Smith estimated that as much as 70 percent of the company's business came through the federal government, although he anticipated the enterprise world would become more interested in their combined hardware-software products.
And there you have it. It appears Smith's prediction is coming true.
Of course, this isn't the first telecom player to sign up with KoolSpan. TrustChip is also the anchor to AT&T's Encrypted Mobile Voice technology.
