Cybersecurity software company Cog, makers of the world's most secure smartphone, today announced $3.5 million in Series A funding from private investment company Grok Ventures and Australian tech venture fund rampersand.

The funding will be used to expand the company's D4 Secure Platform from mobile phones to other internet-connected devices, including the estimated 8 billion "internet of things" (IoT) devices that are currently at risk. The company is also expanding geographically to San Francisco, alongside current locations in Sydney and Chicago.

Cog was launched in 2014 by security industry veteran Dr. Daniel Potts. Potts is a former Northrop Grumman and OK Labs engineer and a member of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's Cybersecurity Roundtable. Cog currently provides secure devices and solutions to the U.S. government and several Fortune 500 companies.

"We recognized that - though the world was roaring toward a cybersecurity revolution as connected devices and IoT hit the mainstream - no one had built a scalable solution yet. That's where Cog comes in," said Potts, who serves as the company's CEO.

"We started by securing the most personal connected device - the smartphone - and now we're building across a much wider range of devices, from automotive to home automation. By steering the security architecture from monolithic to modular, we have brought proactive security to governments and the enterprise without compromising the user experience," Potts added.

With Gartner predicting that 20 billion mobile devices will be in use by 2020, their vulnerability is considered a critical issue by governments around the globe.

According to Jim Cassidy, co-founder and managing partner of rampersand: "The security of mobile and IoT devices has been a huge problem for too long. It's been deeply worrying as most users aren't aware of the security risks in their pocket until something goes wrong. A genuine solution created by an exceptional technical team like the one at Cog, coupled with their growth and client list, made this an exceptionally easy and exciting investment decision."

This is one of the first investments for Grok Ventures, Atlassian founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes' investment vehicle.

"Security of connected devices is increasingly an important challenge to solve. The team at Cog are world-class with deep expertise in solving complex problems. They're building pioneering software that will change the industry, and we're excited to be supporting them," Cannon-Brookes said.

Cog's platform leverages modularity to isolate critical functions and services on connected devices. This approach proactively secures these devices by reducing the attack surface and increases reliability by eliminating single points of failure. The company's solution embeds the additional security features of double encryption, non-bypassable VPNs, nested VPNs, and secure boot to protect the kernel, data and network on the device. The system can scale linearly and infinitely, thus reducing bottlenecks and preserving performance. As this becomes available to the IoT commercial market, it will provide users the flexibility to run any application effectively and securely on their devices.

Cog's pilot product, the D4 Secure Mobile device, is a reference design that runs on the HTC One A9. The U.S. Department of Defense has acquired the first round of commercially available devices for their own internal use.

For more information, visit: https://cog.systems/.