The financing round was co-led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Manta Ray Ventures, with contributions from Mercia Ventures, the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF), the founders of Event Horizon Capital & Osney Capital, and several strategic angels, including Rick Lazansky, founder of Silicon Catalyst, and Illia Polosukhin, founder of NEAR.

The firm addresses a significant challenge in the digital age: the fact that current software encryption solutions can slow down communications networks by adding delay. Communications infrastructure providers are faced with the decision of either incurring significant additional costs by laying down extra fibre capacity to minimise the latency caused by encryption or running lines without encryption, which creates unacceptable enterprise risks.

Sitehop offers a proactive approach to handling the escalating threat level from increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals, with hardware-enforced enterprise encryption. Its flagship product, SAFEblade 1100, offers a more secure alternative to software-based solutions, supporting over 4,000 secure tunnels simultaneously with a low encryption or decryption latency of less than 900 nanoseconds and at a data throughput of 100Gbps. This low latency is vital in scenarios involving high bandwidth network traffic, such as data centres, the Cloud, or edge computing environments.

The SAFE series of products is highly scalable, allowing additional devices to be added as required to increase the volume of data handled. This innovative solution positions Sitehop as a more cost-effective option than competitors’ offerings, which process data through a central computing platform. Additionally, Sitehop benefits the environment by dramatically reducing the power required for encryption by up to 90%.

Melissa Chambers, CEO, Sitehop, commented: “This investment allows us to expand our global reach, with sales and support engineering staff in Brazil, the US, India, and grow our Yorkshire headquarters. We will be adding engineers and production workers and moving into a new Sheffield location. The investment will also enable Sitehop to pursue its technology roadmap – fleshing out the range of SAFE products securing all types of data-in-motion, and developing parallel products using our world-class skillsets in cryptography and programmable hardware design. We aim to get Sitehop’s products into the backbone of most of the world’s networks in the next few years."

Nick Kingsbury, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners, said, “Sitehop is bringing a novel hardware-based approach to a fundamental challenge facing the providers of the essential network infrastructure underpinning our digital society. The flexibility and scalability of Sitehop’s data encryption technology makes it accessible to SMEs as well as large enterprises, meaning there need be no weak link in our defence against cyber criminality.”

Lawrence Barclay, Managing Partner, Manta Ray Ventures, said, "We are really excited to partner with Melissa, Ben and the Sitehop team in the next phase of their journey. We have been incredibly impressed at how thoughtful and effective an approach they have taken to the increasingly critical challenge of network security. We are past the point of dependency on data connectivity and need to ensure enough attention is put on how it is secured without compromise on performance and with important attention to energy efficiency."