Ireland is the base for Vaultree’s cryptography team. The cybersecurity business is also seeking engineers, QAs, mathematicians and physicists.
Ireland-headquartered cybersecurity start-up Vaultree has been busy with news recently. First, there was its $12.8m fund raise announcement. Then there was the news it had been selected by European Innovation Council (EIC) for its latest accelerator programme – which had more than 1,000 applicants. Vaultree was the only successful Irish applicant selected.
Not bad for a start-up that was only founded in 2020. And now Vaultree is preparing to expand its team significantly to cater for all the work it has planned in the encryption tech space.
‘We’ll be recruiting globally, but we are putting a strong emphasis on creating a strong local specialist base. We have probably one of the largest cryptography teams in Ireland, which is very, very unique’
– RYAN LASMAILI
Vaultree’s CEO Ryan Lasmaili told SiliconRepublic.com that the hiring plans over the next few months would see the team nearly doubled from 53 to 103.
The 50 roles Vaultree is hiring for include highly skilled engineers ranging from full stack engineers to low-level and rust engineers. There will also be jobs for DevOps professionals, QAs and experienced mathematicians and physicists.
Lasmaili said that the start-up’s next phase of development will mostly be focusing on “scaling from an operational perspective,” with its strategy targeting growth in Ireland and the US, as well as Europe.
Recruiting on a global basis
The recruiting will be done on a global basis, meaning not all of the 50 roles are guaranteed to be based in Ireland. However, Lasmaili said that Ireland is a valuable part of the business’ growth so far and it will remain Vaultree’s headquarters.
“We’ll be recruiting globally, but we are putting a strong emphasis on creating a strong local specialist base. We have probably one of the largest cryptography teams in Ireland, which is very, very unique.”
Vaultree’s cryptography team is already at 11 people which Lasmaili said “is quite unheard of” in a start-up.
He also said that training cryptographers, which Vaultree does, is mainly reserved for the intelligence sector and those that can afford to pay large amounts of money for upskilling staff.
Unlike some, Lasmaili said the start-up is purely in it because the team love what they do. Vaultree originally began as a sort of passion project, with the business later evolving with an ethos that data privacy is a human right.
It is currently working towards real-time searchable homomorphic encryption technology. In particular, it is focusing on SMEs which are major targets for cybercriminals looking to steal data. Often, these businesses do not have the budget to pay hackers off, said Lasmaili.
For Vaultree, data privacy is a human right that everyone is entitled to. It’s also something that Lasmaili reckons gets lost in the weeds with talk of “cybersecurity solutions”.
“We’re forgetting the fundamental: data. Data is not only gold; it is also a toxic asset,” he said, alluding to the consequences people and businesses face when their data is seized for malicious purposes.
The funding Vaultree has secured, both from its recent Series A $12.8m raise and its previous seed funding raise from 2021, have enabled it to work towards what Lasmaili called “an encrypted tomorrow.”
Although he spoke to SiliconRepublic.com from Cashel, Co Tipperary, the German-born Lasmaili said he is planning to move to the US soon.
He works mainly on a US timeline, but also with a lot of German clients, he said. The EIC taking notice of Vaultree for its accelerator programme is fitting seeing as the start-up already counts Silicon Valley VC firms and Enterprise Ireland among its backers.
‘A very dynamic team’
The company’s team is made up of lots of different nationalities spread out over nine different countries.
“We have a very dynamic team and we are going to maintain the structure and we’re going to roll this out carefully,” Lasmaili said of the hiring plan. In Cork, where the company’s headquarters are, the business is getting its own office area having grown too large for its existing base at the Republic of Work co-working hub. Lasmaili also said the team needs extra privacy as it is working on sensitive projects.
So, what kind of person is Vaultree looking for? “We hire by gut feeling,” Lasmaili said. “We care about individuals; we care about every single person in the team, as an individual, right? And how you would potentially fit into the culture, the vision that we have.”
Openness and transparency is also very much an important part of the company culture, given what it does.
“We are really down to earth and keeping our feet on the ground, heads down,” said Lasmaili, adding that while the pressure is sometimes challenging, the work is always rewarding and everyone works together on solving “some pretty big problems”.
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