Ashburn’s GEOBRIDGE is set to be acquired by a German company

Ashburn, Virginia-based GEOBRIDGE is set to be acquired by international IT security company Utimaco for an undisclosed amount, it announced during the cybersecurity-focused RSA Conference in San Francisco last week.

Founded in 1997, GEOBRIDGE provides enterprises with information security solutions.

“In our digital world, every time you make an electronic payment, shop online or interact with a digital service or a connected device, your personal data and the data transfer are protected with cryptographic keys,” Malte Pollmann, Utimaco’s chief strategy officer, told Technical.ly. Both companies provide “highly secure solutions to generate these crypto keys and manage them to ensure that they cannot be stolen or manipulated, thereby providing a fundamental security cornerstone that helps us feel safe in using those services.”

With roughly 25 employees and contractors, GEOBRIDGE will continue to operate from Ashburn and has plans to increase its team by 25% over the next three months. The company’s employees will integrate with Germany-based Utimaco’s 300-person team over the next year.

“We are extremely excited to become part of the Utimaco team,” said GEOBRIDGE CEO Laura Way in a statement. “Through this acquisition, we will be better positioned to support and provide additional services to our clients around the globe.”

GEOBRIDGE’s KeyBRIDGE platform includes products for managing financial services, including for point-of-sale devices.

“The KeyBRIDGE platform combined with our Atalla hardware security module will offer greater flexibility to financial institutions and payment providers to inject and remotely manage cryptographic keys, simplifying security for our customers even as the environment grows more complex,” Pollmann said in a statement.

The new acquisition is Utimaco’s first since it acquired Micro Focus’ Atalla and Enterprise Secure Key Manager in 2018. The deal with GEOBRIDGE is expected to close this quarter.

“By acquiring GEOBRIDGE, we are taking the next step in developing Utimaco from a product vendor to a solution provider and complementing our solution portfolio in a meaningful way in order to be able to offer customers an integrated security solution,” Pollmann said.