And then there was that LinkedIn post that caught Octave Klaba’s attention […]
Jérôme Masurel, president of 50 Partners, frames OVHcloud’s acquisition of SEALD this way. The accelerator knows the Île-de-France company well: it had participated, in 2018, in SEALD’s seed round.
Since then, SEALD has stayed in the same niche: end‑to‑end encryption. Its technology is offered as desktop software and as an SDK. It earned the CSPN certification in December 2020 (valid for three years).
The First Foundations of SEALD Laid in California
Created in 2016, SEALD initially went by the name STASH. That lasted only a few weeks, until a French marketing agency bearing the same name sent it a cease-and-desist letter.
The four founders were in their twenties at the time. Three of them had converged at UC Berkeley, as part of a program run in partnership with École Polytechnique. SEALD’s milestones were laid there by Timothée Rebours (now 32), who would become the company’s president. He was joined by three general managers: Mehdi Kouen (33, CTO), Maxime Huber (34, CPO), and Dan Lousqui (37, Chief Information Security Officer).
A few weeks before securing the CSPN, SEALD had been shortlisted for the Innovation Award at the Security Summit. More recently (2023), it appeared among the laureates of the call for projects “Cloud-based Collaborative Office Suites,” in consortium with Linagora, WaToo, Wimi and XWiki. In the meantime, there had been a warning: the business continued operating despite losing half of its capital.
Framatome and Stellantis as References
The “office” variant of SEALD is built around a desktop application (Windows, macOS, Linux) that allows file encryption, tracking, and access control. The technology also covers emails and their attachments, potentially in conjunction with DLP engines.
The software library version enables client-side encryption inside web, mobile, and desktop apps. The promise compared with open-source libraries is to remove the headaches of key management, multi-device handling, and data access permissions, among other things. SDKs are available for JavaScript, Android, iOS, and Flutter.
Framatome has used it to secure an internal application that collects sensitive data. Belgium’s Proximus has employed it for a telemedicine app (Doktr). Recare relies on it for its bed-management tool (orchestration of inter-hospital transfers). Lovehoney Group uses it to protect a couple’s messaging app based on CometChat. Stellantis and Lefebvre Sarrut are also among the clientele.
The entry price stands at €250 per month for 5,000 protected users. Beyond that, SEALD charges a progressively decreasing per-user supplement (€0.04 up to 20,000; €0.03 up to 50,000; €0.02 beyond).
“Together, we will democratize security in collaborative services (and more…),” commented Octave Klaba.
