Cleveland’s SCATR Corp. Raises $12.6 Million Series A Led by First In

Cleveland-based cybersecurity company SCATR Corp. has closed a $12.6 million Series A round led by First In Capital, the company announced. Additional participants in the round were not disclosed.

SCATR builds what it calls the ‘Zero Trust Transit’ platform — a category the company says it pioneered — designed to protect data while it moves across networks, rather than only at access points or endpoints where conventional Zero Trust tools operate. According to the company, the software fragments outbound traffic, routes it across multiple randomized paths, and obfuscates the metadata and traffic patterns that adversaries would otherwise use to identify and intercept data in transit.

The raise comes amid growing concern about so-called ‘Harvest Now, Decrypt Later’ (HNDL) campaigns, in which actors collect encrypted traffic with the expectation of decrypting it later once quantum computing matures to the point of aiding such efforts. SCATR says its platform is built to defeat that collection at the point of movement rather than rely on the strength of the encryption itself.

The platform built by the Ohio-based company is software-defined and integrates with existing Zero Trust, SD-WAN, SASE, and cloud security deployments, according to the company, which says full deployment can be completed in under 24 hours. Traffic is secured using AES-256 and ML-KEM encryption.

SCATR said the platform has been deployed across more than 50 operational environments on six continents, spanning government and enterprise settings. The company did not disclose specific customers or revenue figures in the announcement.

"Adversaries have been harvesting encrypted traffic for years, and they are waiting for the moment they can decrypt it," said Matt Carpenter, SCATR's CEO and co-founder, in the announcement. "The operators and analysts we built this for do not have the luxury of waiting."

SCATR was founded by “former U.S. Department of War, Intelligence Community, and cryptologic professionals”. The company holds a portfolio of issued U.S. patents covering components it refers to as Data Camouflage, intelligent multi-path routing, and AI/ML-driven adaptive obfuscation. 

First In Capital, which led the Series A funding round, was founded in 2020 and focuses on cybersecurity, defense technology, and data-driven security platforms. Managing Partner Renny McPherson said the firm invested because it expects Zero Trust Transit to become "a standard layer of every serious security architecture, and SCATR is the company that defined it."

The funds will be used for go-to-market expansion across supply chain and logistics, financial services, energy, healthcare, and telecommunications, alongside continued product development and team growth, the company said.

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