Digital resilience group Shearwater has acquired award-winning data loss protection firm GeoLang.
The AIM-listed company is paying £1.7m for the Cardiff-based software developer, which was in 2015 named as the UK’s Most Innovative Small Cyber Security Company at InfoSec.
GeoLang is behind DLP technology platform Ascema, which helps organisations protect sensitive information at the content level by discovering, classifying and remediating data.
The platform is able to discover data and detect sentences from confidential information, enabling the information to be quarantined or blocked in real time.
It has been developed over the past five years by co-founder and CEO Dr Debbie Garside, alongside the business’ core engineering team and chairman Andrew Sleigh.
GeoLang also received early stage support through an Innovate UK collaboration project with Jaguar Land Rover and the University of Surrey.
“For us, GeoLang represents another example of a great British technology business with significant potential to scale,” said Shearwater chairman David Williams.
“Under Debbie’s leadership and with the support of UK academia and the Government, the business is now ideally poised to take the next step on its journey, and we look forward to supporting it in its development and helping it reach its full potential.”
Dr Debbie Garside added: “Team GeoLang are thrilled to be joining Shearwater at such a pivotal time in the business’ evolution. Finding the right partner to support us in achieving our growth plans has been critical and in Shearwater, we believe we have done that.
“”heir strategy of building a digital resilience group with such a strong UK focus resonates well with us and we are very excited about the potential for Ascema and the wider Shearwater Group as a whole.”
GeoLang will continue to be led by Garside and will form part of Shearwater’s information and assurance business, Xcina.