Cambridge UK startup Bromium has roared out of stealth with a $26.5 million Series B round and technology that promises to end the pain of IT sabotage for thousands of global organisations.

Co-founder Simon Crosby has this minute launched the new micro-virtualisation technology and announced the new fundraising at GigaOM Structure 2012 in San Francisco – just three months after Bromium was named Business Weekly’s Startup of the Year.

Crosby said the pioneering software would transform the security and trustworthiness of enterprise desktops and mobile devices.

The founders of Bromium led the development of the Xen hypervisor that today powers the largest clouds and the most secure PCs.

Bromium also unveiled the $26.5m (£16.9m) Series B funding from lead investor Highland Capital Partners, new investor Intel Capital, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Ignition Ventures. The tyrotechs have now raised almost $36m in a calendar year.

The Cambridge University Computer Lab spin-out has a transatlantic business model but co-founder Ian Pratt outlined the importance of Cambridge as the company continued to grow with new hires and a new HQ.

He told Business Weekly exclusively: “It’s great to be finally out of stealth mode. Cambridge is certainly central to our plans and we're hiring great developers as fast as we can find them, plus sales engineers, L3 support engineers and QA engineers.

“Michael Dales has just joined us in Cambridge to build and lead a new engineering group to develop an Apple OSX version of the product, so we're
expecting a lot of growth there, too.

“We're just about to move into a new much bigger office at Lockton House, near the rail station so we're more convenient for London and Stansted.

“Right now we're concentrating on markets in just the UK and US and are working with a group of sophisticated customers who are only too aware of
the security threats their businesses face and are looking for a solution to protect their Intellectual Property and secure their systems.

“We're building a very mainstream product that will be applicable to all businesses, but it makes sense for us to initially work with folk in finance, government, legal etc who are experiencing organised attacks on a frequent basis.”

Bromium is developing products that enable IT to safely navigate the challenges of advanced persistent malware, a shifting workforce and the consumerisation of IT.

Bromium’s products are built on the Bromium Microvisor™ – a second-generation virtualisation technology that applies the isolation and security principles of virtualisation to tasks running within the operating system of a PC or mobile device - completely hidden from the user, who enjoys an unchanged native desktop user experience.

The Microvisor automatically identifies each vulnerable task and instantly hardware-isolates it within a micro-VM, which is a lightweight, hardware-backed isolation container that polices access to all OS services and resources. Micro-VMs run natively, with full performance, but continually protects the desktop – even from unknown threats.

Micro-virtualisation makes PCs and mobile devices trustworthy by design – automatically blocking and discarding malware and advanced threats. It protects data and applications at all times, even on devices that have not been patched, allowing IT to safely embrace mobility and consumer use of enterprise devices, empowering employees and ensuring compliance while simplifying desktop management.

Peter Bell, partner, Highland Capital Partners, said: “The Bromium team has the industry credibility, technical chops and execution focus needed to revolutionise the trustworthiness of PCs and mobile devices, empowering both IT and users.

“Every challenge resulting from mobility, consumerisation of IT and cloud computing boils down to a question of risk to the enterprise versus empowerment of users. Bromium is the answer.”

Rick Echevarria, VP, Intel Architecture Group, & GM, Intel Business Client Platform Division said that Bromium’s innovative use of Intel processor-based platforms promised to make end-point protection transparent and intuitive.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Bromium co-founder Simon Crosby