eperi

eperi, based in Pfungstadt, Germany, sells a data protection gateway — the eperi Secure product line — that sits between an organization and cloud or SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, encrypting or tokenizing sensitive fields before they leave the customer’s control while preserving enough application functionality, such as search and sort, to keep the SaaS app usable. The pitch is aimed specifically at European enterprises trying to use US-hosted SaaS platforms while staying compliant with GDPR and the post-Schrems II requirement that EU personal data not be freely accessible to US cloud providers under US surveillance law.

This ‘bring your own encryption key to someone else’s SaaS’ model is a real and growing compliance need but a structurally narrow one: it matters most to organizations both bound by EU data protection law and committed to using non-European-hosted SaaS platforms. eperi traces its roots to 2003 and rebranded under the eperi name in 2014, giving it more product maturity than most newer GDPR-compliance point solutions.

In February 2022, private equity firm Equistone Partners Europe acquired a majority stake in eperi from earlier venture investors Evolution Equity Partners and btov, with founder and CEO Elmar Eperiesi-Beck remaining in charge and retaining a stake. That is a growth-capital transaction, not an acquisition into a larger cybersecurity platform, so eperi continues to operate and sell as an independent company under new majority ownership focused on scaling and international expansion.