IronCore Labs

Market position

IronCore Labs describes itself as a pioneering force in data privacy with security for AI data, cloud data and encrypted search, and has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor. It is tracked as a data privacy and application-layer encryption portfolio company of Tahoma Ventures.

The company positions Cloaked AI as the first commercial vector encryption product, addressing the risk that vector embeddings can be inverted back to close approximations of the source text, faces or images and therefore act as another copy of private data. Products are database-agnostic, working with Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, Chroma, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, pgvector, Milvus, LanceDB and Redis, and with AWS, GCP, Azure, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle and Hadoop. Other stated differentiators include per-tenant, per-region and per-data-segment key separation with customer-held keys in external KMSes (including on-premises HSMs), immediate global revocation, open-source and audited cryptographic libraries, and crypto-agility for post-quantum migration. IronCore Labs has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor.

Technology

The platform implements application-layer encryption so that data is encrypted before it reaches data stores and remains encrypted in use. Cloaked AI uses property-preserving encryption that maintains distance relationships between vectors, based on the "Approximate Distance-Comparison-Preserving Symmetric Encryption" paper by Georg Fuchsbauer, Riddhi Ghosal, Nathan Hauke and Adam O'Neill, using a scale-and-perturb algorithm that adds noise and redistributes vectors while preserving relative distances; models trained on encrypted embeddings inherit the same protection. The Data Control Platform uses a proxy re-encryption scheme the company calls transform encryption, described in the ACM paper "Cryptographically Enforced Orthogonal Access Control at Scale," allowing encryption to a group public key with delegated and revocable decryption rights. Core libraries include recrypt-rs (Rust proxy re-encryption primitives), gridiron (constant-time big-number math), ironoxide and language bindings, ironhide and ironoxide-cli command-line tools, tenant-security-client SDKs for Go, Java, Node.js and PHP, and ironcore-alloy, a unified Rust library covering Cloaked AI vector encryption. The platform supports crypto-agility, letting algorithms, key sizes, KMSes and cloud providers be changed by configuration rather than code.

Go-to-market

The company sells through a developer-oriented motion: open-source SDKs and repositories on GitHub, public documentation, a demo application, a Discord server and community forums, free-to-try tooling such as VectorLens, and a startup program offering free services to qualifying early-stage companies. It also maintains a resource center of blogs, newsletters, podcasts, press releases, videos and explainers, and its executives present at security conferences including DEF CON, OWASP Global, LASCon, SnowFROC, RMISC and BSidesLV.

Engineering, security, privacy and GRC teams at cloud software companies, particularly multi-tenant SaaS vendors selling to large and international enterprise customers, and organizations building generative AI, RAG and vector search systems on sensitive data. Earlier positioning targeted cloud software companies seeking to reduce security and compliance barriers to enterprise sales.

Geography

Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, at 1750 30th St. 500, Boulder, CO 80301. At the time of its 2017 seed round the company also had an office in Bozeman, Montana.

History

IronCore Labs was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. In May 2017, when it announced a $1.5 million seed round, the company had offices in Bozeman, Montana and Boulder, Colorado and described itself as a developer of customer-controlled data for SaaS companies, helping cloud software vendors reduce security and compliance barriers to enterprise sales by shifting control of encryption keys to data owners. The product line subsequently expanded from the open-source Data Control Platform and SaaS Shield into encrypted search (Cloaked Search), vector embedding encryption (Cloaked AI) and, in June 2026, the VectorLens PII scanner for embeddings.

Risks & controversies

The company notes that most of its open-source code is licensed under AGPL, requiring a commercial license for use in commercial or non-GPL software. Its own published research highlights that vector embeddings can be inverted to reconstruct source data, a risk its products are designed to address.