Cossack Labs

Cossack Labs builds application-layer encryption and data security tooling for organizations that need to protect sensitive data without re-architecting their applications. Its flagship product, Acra, is a database security proxy that adds field-level encryption, SQL-injection detection, and intrusion-detection honeypots in front of a database with minimal changes to application code. The company also maintains Themis, an open-source cryptographic library used by developers to add authenticated encryption and secure data exchange to their own software, and Hermes, a framework for multi-user end-to-end encrypted data storage.

Founded in 2014, Cossack Labs is headquartered in London with its engineering and research team based in Kyiv, Ukraine. The company has operated continuously for over a decade without a large publicly disclosed funding round, growing instead through direct enterprise and services engagements with fintech, healthcare, critical-infrastructure, and decentralized-finance customers who need to encrypt sensitive data in distributed systems.

The company’s approach — positioning encryption as a transparent proxy layer rather than a software development kit developers must integrate line by line — sets it apart from vendors that require heavier application-side rework. Its open-source libraries have visible, actively maintained repositories on GitHub, giving outside engineers a way to inspect the underlying cryptography directly rather than relying solely on vendor claims.