CipherStash

CipherStash builds searchable, application-layer encryption for Postgres — letting developers encrypt sensitive fields with a unique key per value while still running searches, joins, and queries against the ciphertext without ever decrypting it in the database itself. The pitch is that the database (and by extension, a database compromise, a misconfigured backup, or an over-privileged support engineer) never sees plaintext, while application functionality that depends on querying that data keeps working, addressing the classic tradeoff where encrypting a field usually breaks the ability to search or filter on it.

Founded in Sydney in 2020 by Dan Draper, Lindsay Holmwood, and James Sadler, the company has raised roughly $6 million total, including a $3 million round in October 2023 led by Skip Capital with participation from SixThirty Ventures. Its ZeroKMS key management service and native plugins for Drizzle and Prisma, plus connectors for Auth0 and Clerk, target developers building on modern application stacks rather than large legacy enterprises retrofitting encryption onto existing databases.

At roughly a dozen employees, CipherStash is early-stage, and its differentiated data-level access control model is architecturally interesting but has not yet been stress-tested at large enterprise scale in public case studies, making it a promising but still largely unproven approach outside of its own documentation and open-source tooling.