Co-founder Kory Gill

An all-too-common occurrence led Kory Gill to look for a new way to backup data.

In 2007, the Northwest was hit with a particularly bad winter. A lightning strike hit in Gill's backyard and the power surge fried three computers. Newline Software was founded in June 2008 with co-founder Marius Nita, and the company's first product began testing in 2009.

In August, Newline introduced Exact, its backup system that encrypts all of the data uploaded to the cloud, including metadata. The company is also marketing its OPTIC technology, which allows for search queries of encrypted data. Last week, the Redmond-based company announced $1.3 million in funding.

What is OPTIC? As a side effect of our mission to backup data, the idea for OPTIC came up. Essentially we can work with encrypted data in the cloud without having to decript it. This is big for us and the industry. We discovered a way to perform exact searches on encrypted data that could be one character or a million. With our technology, you can query the cloud for something without knowing the directory of everything else stored there.

What are the potential uses of OPTIC? Anywhere where there's a transfer of sensitive data in public or private clouds. Say you want to transfer data to a client, but you don't want anyone in between to see the data. Even though these shares may be password protected, the place where you store the data still know the file names. We want to license to other companies because they best know the data that they want to secure. For example, say you are refinancing a house. PDFs with personal information are usually sent over e-mail, making it fairly easy for anyone to see. This is where we're just scratching the service of how data is transferred and stored.

What is your background? Prior to Newline, I worked at Microsoft for 18 years. I last worked for developer of Windows Logo program, and before that worked on NT service packs ran development teams for NT. When I look back now, all of those different positions gave me a view on different areas of the process. After leaving, me and my co-founder looked at things we liked and didn't like at Microsoft and the rest of the industry and built our own company the way we wanted.

How have you been funded before last week's funding round? Are you looking for additional funding? Friends and family. We founded with our own money, then funded through friends and family. We'll be seeking venture funding in the future.

How many employees do you have? Are you hiring? Newline has four employees. We're not hiring at the moment, but we envision looking for people after the venture capital round. As we see more customers, we'll look for more employees as there's need.

What's your competition? As far as Optic technology, we don't believe anybody has it. As far as online backup and restore, nobody has the level of security and privacy that we have. Moving a file to the cloud and back is simple. Mnay people think they need to backup their files, but you really need to be able to restore it.

Have you enjoyed the startup process after your Microsoft career? Working at a larger company, you don't have a direct connection to all of your customers. We don't have senseless meetings and things like that. At the end of the day, it's really rewarding.

What does the future look like? We see more and more things be cloud-based or being involved with the cloud. Everyone's looking for what can be done in the cloud, and it could be potentially upward of $400 billion. A lot of companies are looking to outsource their data centers, so if they can move that data to the cloud it's a major cost savings. Trusting the cloud is the big barrier. This is where integrating Optic is where we fit in. Maybe Optic is a $1 billion chunk of that. Companies have a lot of safeguards to secure data, but we're looking how to make everything more private and secure.

Interview conducted and condensed by Anthony James