The round was led by Advance Venture Partners (AVP) with participation from existing venture capital firms and strategic investors. The company will use this latest round of investment to expand its sales and marketing efforts, and to fund new product development. The company will also utilize a portion of the proceeds to fund the acquisition of DataGravity (http://bit.ly/2v68Y2y), which was also announced today.

The funding comes at a time when the threat level to enterprise IT remains at very high levels, with daily media accounts of large breaches and attacks and when large enterprises and government organizations are pursuing data-center transformation projects that embrace both private and public cloud infrastructure, posing challenges for existing security approaches.

Leading this latest round of funding is Advance Venture Partners ("AVP"), an investment firm that invests in early and growth stage companies, and leverages its relationship with media and technology holding company Advance Publications to provide strategic insights, access and impact to its portfolio companies. Also participating in the round are existing venture investors Sway Ventures, Epic Ventures, Vanedge Capital and Trident Capital, and strategic investors Cisco, Fortinet, Intel Corp. and VMware.

"HyTrust is very well positioned to capitalize on a tremendous growth opportunity in the cloud security space," said David ibnAle, a founding partner of AVP. "The need for security, automated compliance and policy enforcement for cloud infrastructure and data is critical in almost every industry, and HyTrust is front and center in this field. Gartner's recent highlighting of the sector as a top security technology for 2017 underscores the relevance of HyTrust's solutions, and we are extremely excited about the opportunity to back the market leader in this space."

Earlier this month, Gartner identified Cloud Workload Protection Platforms among the top technologies for information security in 2017. Presenting their findings during the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Maryland, analysts highlighted hybrid cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) as providing information security leaders with an integrated way to protect the various workload types supported by modern data centers, using a single management console and a single way to express security policy, regardless of where the workload runs -- physical machines, virtual machines (VMs), containers, private cloud infrastructure, public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

"It is an exciting time for HyTrust with a trifecta of validation for HyTrust receiving this latest funding from AVP and our existing investors, being selected by three of the top five banks, two leading credit card brands and top government agencies to secure their workloads, and having Gartner highlight cloud workload protection as a top technology for information security in 2017," said John De Santis, Chairman and CEO of HyTrust. "We are the leaders in a fast-growing field whose primacy is reaffirmed daily, and we are delighted our investors recognize our role in providing the security that has become a critical enabler of cloud adoption."

About HyTrust (www.hytrust.com)
HyTrust's mission is to make private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure more trustworthy for enterprises, service providers and government agencies. HyTrust provides solutions that automate security controls for software-defined computing, networking and storage workloads to achieve the highest levels of visibility, granular policy control and data protection. HyTrust customers benefit from being able to accelerate cloud and virtualization cost savings while improving their security posture by automating and enforcing security policies in real time, adapting quickly to compliance requirements, and preventing unplanned outages.

Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, HyTrust is backed by the leading providers of strategic IT infrastructure including VMware, Cisco, Intel and Fortinet; by the vanguard of innovative solutions for the intelligence community, In-Q-Tel; and by a world class group of financial investors including AVP, Sway Ventures, Granite Ventures, Trident Capital and Vanedge Capital. HyTrust was recently named one of CRN's "20 Coolest Cloud Security Vendors", a recipient of VMworld's 2015 Gold Award for Security/Compliance and Virtualization, and the Most Innovative Cloud Company at Intel Security Focus 2015.

About Advance Venture Partners (www.avpgrowth.com)
Advance Venture Partners ("AVP") combines the disciplined approach of an institutional venture and growth equity investor with the strategic insights, access and impact made possible by a high-value strategic partner. The firm was founded in partnership with Advance Publications, a privately-owned media and technology holding company with a portfolio that includes Condé Nast, The American City Business Journals and local media assets in more than 25 cities, as well as significant ownership stakes in Reddit, Charter Communications, Discovery Communications and 1010Data. AVP invests in early and growth stage technology, media and commerce companies and draws upon the domain expertise and intellectual capital that Advance Publications has developed as an owner and operator of businesses in these sectors for over 100 years. For more information, please visit www.avpgrowth.com.