Very Good Security (VGS)
Payment and sensitive-data tokenization platform that lets businesses handle, store, and route payment card and other regulated data without that data ever touching their own infrastructure in cleartext.
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Very Good Security (VGS) was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Mahmoud Abdelkader and Marshall Jones to solve a specific compliance and risk problem: handling payment card data (or other regulated data types) inside your own systems dramatically expands PCI-DSS compliance scope and breach liability, even when that data passes through only briefly. VGS’s tokenization platform intercepts sensitive data at the edge and replaces it with a token before it ever reaches a customer’s own servers, letting the token be used for most business operations without the underlying data being present.
The company raised a $60 million Series C in December 2020 led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from Visa and Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to roughly $104 million. Visa’s participation as an investor is notable given VGS’s core use case around payment-data tokenization, suggesting a degree of strategic validation from a major payments network.
VGS competes with Basis Theory and payment processors’ own native tokenization offerings, differentiating through its network-agnostic approach that works across multiple payment processors and data types rather than locking customers into a single processor’s tokenization scheme.
Innovation Matrix Assessment
Has extended tokenization coverage beyond payment cards to broader regulated data types over roughly a decade, a steady but not exceptionally fast pace of capability expansion.
Tokenization at the edge measurably reduces PCI-DSS and other compliance scope for customer systems, a concrete and auditable operational benefit for security and compliance teams.
A $104M total raise including strategic investment from Visa indicates solid market validation, though the company has not disclosed unicorn-level valuation figures publicly.
Tokenization itself is an established compliance-scope-reduction technique; VGS's contribution is making it processor-agnostic and broadly accessible rather than inventing the underlying approach.
Visa's investor participation is a meaningful strategic-validation signal, but no independent third-party audit of tokenization security or compliance-scope-reduction outcomes was found.
As payment and regulated-data compliance requirements remain persistently strict, processor-agnostic tokenization continues to address a genuine, ongoing enterprise need.
Why CISOs Should Care
VGS lets security and compliance teams dramatically shrink their PCI-DSS and other regulated-data compliance scope, because tokenized data can flow through business systems for most operational purposes without the underlying sensitive data ever being present to breach.
What Makes It Different
Its tokenization is processor-agnostic and extends beyond just payment card data to other regulated data types, differentiating it from single-processor-locked tokenization schemes that only work within one payment network's ecosystem.
The Matrix Verdict
55/100 — INCREMENTAL INNOVATOR
A well-funded, strategically validated tokenization platform (notably including Visa as an investor) addressing a clear and quantifiable compliance-scope-reduction value proposition. A solid Meaningful Innovator.
Editorial Note: Claims vs. Verified Findings
Funding and investor details, including Visa's participation, are corroborated by BusinessWire's own funding announcement; PCI-scope-reduction outcomes are vendor-reported and were not independently audited.
Sources
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