The following interview is a conversation we had with Ryan Lasmaili, CEO of Vaultree, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $16 Million Raised to Build the World’s First Fully Functional Data-in-Use Encryption
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Snapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Ryan Lasmaili, Co-Founder and CEO of Vaulttree, an encryption as a service platform that’s raised over 3 million in funding. Ryan, thanks for chatting with me today.
Ryan Lasmaili
Hey, how’s it going? How are you?
Brett
I’m great and excited to chat with you. Thanks, Ryan, for joining.
Ryan Lasmaili
Yeah, I’m joining right now from Barcelona in Spain, but hopefully soon we’ll be in San Francisco as well.
Brett
Nice. Very cool. So let’s begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Ryan Lasmaili
Yeah, sure. I’ve got a bit more of an unusual background, but I lived all over the world. My background is Irish, German, French, Spanish, West African, was born in Germany, raised in many African countries, Asia and in Europe, and at the age of 15 decided to move to Belfast, went to school in Belfast. And my background actually is financial math. So studied finance and financial mathematics and statistics. But I’ve always been fascinated by tech and how to actually solve some problems in the space, difficult problems, and how we can help with those solutions, actually everyone else. So that always has fascinated me. But, yeah, that’s it.
Brett
And you mentioned there in our pre interview that it was 26 countries that you’ve lived in so far, is that correct?
Ryan Lasmaili
Yes, it’s been 26 countries now up to the age of 15. Right. My mom is a doctor, or was a doctor with no border, so I was racked around with my other three brothers and sister around all those countries. Right. It’s been incredible. But, yeah, being one h*** of a journey, let’s put it like that, I imagine.
Brett
And now a couple of questions just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. Is there a CEO that you’re studying the most now? And if so, who is it and what are you learning from them?
Ryan Lasmaili
Truth to be told, there actually is none. Right. I mean, I always love learning about other people’s history and journeys and learning from others, but really right now I am just focused on myself and if I can learn from others through conversations, happy days. But I wouldn’t really have such a Founder that I would look up to. I think every Founder is incredible and have their own very unique journey and something that I’m always interested in. Nice.
Brett
And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s really influenced you as a Founder? This can be a business book or just a personal book as well.
Ryan Lasmaili
I’m definitely not going to bore you with statistics or several books that have shaped me early in my days, but no, I would say again, probably the same from a journey perspective. Right. I think that everyone has an absolutely unique story, incredible story in itself. For example, one I think that has fascinated me is David Gargan’s story really around how everything we can shape just with our mental resilience and how we believe in ourselves. But really, I mean, from coming to the point here, I would say not really. Right. I think everyone is shaping and writing their own story and I love reading about them, but I wouldn’t say that it has impacted me significantly. Makes sense.
Brett
Yeah. I read the David Goggins book a couple of years ago and it inspired me to become a runner. So I just did a marathon and I’m doing 50 miles run now because of David Goggins.
Ryan Lasmaili
Wow. Okay. Now I definitely do not want to run on a broken leg, but I can tell you that he’s one h*** of a guy. But there take a note of incredible stories out there, right? I mean, there’s this one guy, the Iceman. Wim HOF. Yeah, wim HOF. Exactly. That’s it. Was he climbing up Mount Everest in swim shorts? Yeah. Now, I won’t be doing that anytime soon, but some incredible stories out there from incredible people. Absolutely nice.
Brett
So let’s switch gears and talk about what you’re building today. So can you tell us about the origin story behind the company and then give us the high level customer pitch of what you do for your customers?
Ryan Lasmaili
Yeah, sure. So Walltree is all about solving problems. Now specifically one problem, but it started actually about eight years ago, longer than that, actually, I think now nine years, but basically around realizing that every single day we have a new data breach, we have data being leaked. Problems are not solved around data literally lying around in plain text and being vulnerable on a continuous basis and us running and having legacy systems in place. And even with new systems, right, problems are not solved. And every single time reading about potential solutions that are really just around workaround solutions, but the problem in itself, which is data in plain text in readable form, that problem has not been solved.
Ryan Lasmaili
And so we really started around learning how the science and then understanding one, the mathematics around encryption, and two, the science around from a computer science perspective, the hardware and the engineering element, how to potentially solve this problem. And that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been sticking to it, to our guns, working day jobs and at the same time in the evenings, on weekends, working away on how we can solve this. Right. And I’m happy to say we have, and it’s been one incredible journey, but basically in a summary, we allow for the processing of fully randomized encrypted data at scale without ever decrypting data again. And any organization can use this utilizing their existing tech stacks, utilizing their own databases. We don’t hold any data, we don’t have another, let’s say proxy or workaround solution.
Ryan Lasmaili
We tackle the problem at source and it can scale with an enterprise. So it’s the first fully functioning global, fully homomorphic and searchable encryption technology as such.
Brett
And could you define what homomorphic is? It’s the first time I’ve heard that term. I saw it on your website earlier today and yeah, if you could just explain that like I’m a five year old that would be helpful for me and I’m sure helpful for some of our listeners as well.
Ryan Lasmaili
Yeah, of course I’m not going to bore you with the science of it, right? But if you can think of it like this, right? US being able to share data, fully encrypted with each other and analyze and process that data without ever decrypting that data again and doing this with simplicity. And also how we are sharing keys, rotating keys, I’m not going to go into the details of that, but to simple context. That’s what it is basically allowing data to be in its always encrypted form and working with that data. And as an end customer as such, you are able to get the results of let’s say a query or computation and decrypting it client side. So we are calling it at Walltree also last millimeter decryption, right?
Ryan Lasmaili
You are the only person that is going to be seeing the results in plain text, but in the back end they are always encrypted. So you can do anything, let’s say from a simple query computation in fully encrypted form all the way to sharing data with third parties and cross border, you name it, even building products on top of fully encrypted data, utilizing it and using this technology in the end to actually process that data. Got it?
Brett
Makes sense. And where are you seeing the most market adoption right now? Is it a specific segment of the market or a specific vertical? What does that look like?
Ryan Lasmaili
Yeah, so to date this technology has been quite limited due to the nature of how it has been developed. Developed on top of what kind of new algorithms have been developed in the space. So it would be usually quite niche and specific, let’s say to the analytics sector especially, and I’m not going to go into too much detail, but a lot of the technologies right now have a certain arrow that is actually being tolerated as such and analytics functions is actually one of them. So in relation to Vaultry, we have solved the problem of actually performing queries and transactions computations that are 100% accurate. Now in terms of this technology and the adoption, we can from a voltage perspective now adopt, integrate this tech anywhere, literally anywhere. But we are starting off with databases.
Ryan Lasmaili
Now, in general, the technology out there that we have right now is very niche and it’s quite difficult to adopt it in, let’s say, to normal use cases where we are saying, for example, okay, you have XYZ database and you’re using this tech stack. Do you want to utilize this technology? It’s very difficult and more or less unusable with the current technologies we have. So it’s quite limited to specific use cases and in each sector. But this is where we, for example, come in and we can say, okay, you can use it with any tech stack, any database, technology, environment, we don’t really care as such. So if you see it like that, it’s like having a mobile phone, right? Every one of us has a mobile phone. We don’t think about or talk about the technology that is in those phones, right?
Ryan Lasmaili
It’s just your day to day item. And this is how we would like to move as to making this technology used by everyone every day, all the time, without you even thinking it’s integrated into your day to day life.
Brett
Nice, I love that. And when it comes to market categories, how do you think about market categories? Do you view encryption as a service, as the market category, or what are your thoughts there?
Ryan Lasmaili
Yeah, this is an interesting one, right, because those markets, or let’s say the categories, are not that well defined and there’s also an educational element here, right? Because the market as such is only over the last couple of years getting real exposure to this site of the technologies that exist out there. Privacy enhancing technologies, to be more precise. And it’s been more or less really a sector that has been reserved to the few, right? Which in this case would be either in the public sector or in the research side, but not really on the commercial side. So categorization, you see some funky terms out there, but I would say that probably data in use encryption is the one that makes most sense.
Ryan Lasmaili
You get some other categorizations either based on, let’s say, certain technologies that are used for certain niche use cases where you have a different categorization. But encryption as a service, you could see it as one, but I would say probably data in use encryption is one that actually works best.
Brett
Got, it makes sense. And then are there any numbers you can share just to show us what the traction looks like?
Ryan Lasmaili
So far it’s been absolutely insane, to be honest. For us, specifically, every organization that we are talking to, at the beginning, the conversation could be like, oh, we have no use case, or we don’t know, or this doesn’t work, right? But it’s mainly because they don’t understand really that their data and everyone’s data is vulnerable, more or less, right? But after literally two minutes, it’s like, oh wow, okay, you do this, okay, we can do that, we didn’t even know. So basically every conversation usually we have with an organization ends up in us moving this along to either a pilot, a POC and a customer in this case. So it’s really incredible to see this right now.
Ryan Lasmaili
I would say most of our traction is inbound, which is amazing to see, but I think it’s definitely still sort of a sector that is covered by peculiar. Like, imagine a room full of nerds, right, writing algorithms all day long that are really funky and you have to translate that into a language that everyone else is going to understand and also how you’re being perceived. Right. So, yeah, I think they’re sort of bridging the gap into an educational element here for sure makes sense.
Brett
And as you’ve brought this idea to market, what would you say has been the greatest challenge you faced and how did you overcome that challenge?
Ryan Lasmaili
I would say the biggest challenge definitely is the educational element. Right. I give you a great example here. So we had one call with one customer and last bank, and we spoke to that CISO and he joined the call not by saying hello, he just said, this is not possible. He didn’t even say hello. Right. But in the end we showed a demo and he was tipping out. He was sitting on the edge of the seat. We were seeing that because he was tipped back and forth the whole time, but he fell off his chair. Then after we showed the demo, were of course saying he must have been so impressed that he actually fell off his chair. But no, he did fall off his chair.
Ryan Lasmaili
And the challenge really, I mean, to give you an idea, is that perception, right, of, okay, I don’t need this technology, I have everything else. I have, let’s say 100 security solutions. But the educational element here is, yeah, it doesn’t matter how many onion layers you have, your data is still in readable form, so you literally just cut right through the onion. So in this case, to have that educational element of really showing the benefit and the value that you’re bringing to an organization, which is absolutely tremendous. And for them to get and understand that is really the educational challenge. And how you overcome that is by, first of all, demos understanding and bringing a very clear value proposition very quickly to a customer to make them understand.
Ryan Lasmaili
And it really depends also on the sector you’re talking to because all from behave differently, totally differently. And countries as well, by the way, if you go to Asia, they are more interested in something that is going to help not only their own company, but also in benefit of the country and the people. And then you go to Europe. In Europe it’s more specifically to GDPR and compliance and then you are going then let’s say to the US. For example, Canada and US. It’s more like, okay, how can we utilize this tech to also, for example, sell to my customers. So it’s different nations, different educational hurdles. But yeah, I would say that’s the biggest one makes a lot of sense.
Brett
And last couple of questions here before we wrap. What excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Ryan Lasmaili
Oh, wow. It’s people, without doubt. People and challenges every single day, meeting great people and having new conversations, learning from others. And I mean, you’re really immersed into an environment where, for example, at Walter, you’re right. We are very unique in the way we, for example, bring people into the organization. It’s not your seven interviews and saying, okay, now you’re going to have to write several tests. Actually, we only do two interviews and we tend not to do a test. And to give you an idea, one of our cryptographers never studied math, right? And she’s one of our most talented cryptographers, but all the way to how we actually bring engineers and talent into the organization. We believe in giving everyone an equal chance.
Ryan Lasmaili
So we don’t care what your background is, have you been to which college and for how long and which company? No, we care about people. And that is what excites me every single day. It’s people and we’re talking, learning from others and really bringing great people into the organization, around us and around me, and learning from the best.
Brett
Amazing. And one other question for you, because this goes against the grain and were talking about this in the pre interview, but you’re one of the crazy ones. You’re moving to San Francisco, as many others in the media at least say that they’re leaving. What made you decide to go to San Francisco, despite that narrative that seems to be playing out that Silicon Valley and San Francisco is in decline?
Ryan Lasmaili
I totally disagree with that now. I mean, for tax benefit purposes, okay, great. You have the odd folk that are moving out, right? But really, you still have an amazing concentration of different nations, different backgrounds, startups from Egypt all the way to South Africa to Argentina who are moving and are located in the Bay Area and really getting to be such a hub. Right. I can tell you right away, over the last year, actually, I’ve been in San Francisco quite a bit. You meet every single day a new Founder, new tech company, different type of a startup. And I would say it’s a very unique place that I have not seen in any other city or country as such, where you’re meeting such a high concentration of incredible founders and talent as such.
Ryan Lasmaili
So, yeah, I think definitely still the place to go, and I’m really looking forward to moving.
Brett
Amazing. Last question here for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the five year vision for the company?
Ryan Lasmaili
Wow, okay. So, I mean, this technology in the space we’re in, right, this is without doubt the future. The future being encrypted. That’s it, literally. So when we’re talking about data, right, data being encrypted and the future being encrypted. Right. So how are we getting there? Right? This is going to be the exciting part of this journey. But I can tell you right now that this is only the beginning of it and it is about time that we are really talking about encrypting data and how we are working with encrypted data and even the future.
Ryan Lasmaili
When I’m talking about future here, the possibilities of what kind of products and what kind of other potential technologies and startups are going to appear around the topic of encrypted data because it becomes now a possibility of building on top of encryption in a way that we could not have done it before. And that is very exciting. So what the future is going to hold, I cannot tell you, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here. But I can tell you definitely it is going to be very interesting. Nice.
Brett
Well, that certainly got me excited. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for this interview. But this has been a blast. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and learning more about you and the vision and the problem that you’re solving here. So really appreciate your time. And before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Ryan Lasmaili
LinkedIn. I’m not really a social person. Right. But I don’t have Instagram, don’t have Facebook, don’t have Twitter, but yeah, you might meet me in San Francisco somewhere for coffee. LinkedIn is usually the place. Awesome.
Brett
Well, thanks again, Ryan, really appreciate it and wish you best of luck in executing on this vision.
Ryan Lasmaili
Lovely. Thanks a lot, Brett, nice to meet you.
Brett
You too, take care.
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