Krypt.co, a new security startup founded by two former MIT students and one of their professors, is launching today with a free product called Kryptonite, designed to help developers protect their private encryption keys, using an app on their smartphones.
It’s a big day for the fledgling company as it also announced a $1.2 million seed round led by Rough Draft Ventures/General Catalyst with participation from Slow Ventures, SV Angel and Akamai Labs. That’s a solid roster of backers for their first swing at funding.
The company came out of research by two former MIT students, Alex Grinman and Kevin King, who shared a common passion for encryption. The two friends believed that they had found a better way to protect encryption keys and they approached their professor David Gifford, who thought it was a good idea and helped them launch the company.
Kryptonite takes advantage of typical public/private key encryption using the Secure Socket Shell (SSH) protocol used by developers to log onto networks remotely. Typically, they store their private keys on a laptop, but the founders saw this as inherently insecure because apps aren’t sandboxed and separated from…