The Story of Vaulttree: The Company Building the Future of Encrypted Data

Nine years is a long time to work on something nobody believes is possible. Nine years of day jobs to pay the bills. Nine years of evenings and weekends spent on a problem that most cryptographers consider unsolvable.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ryan Lasmaili, Co-Founder and CEO of Vaulttree, shared how his company emerged from nearly a decade of patient work to solve one of encryption’s fundamental challenges.

The Problem That Wouldn’t Go Away

The story begins with a persistent observation Ryan couldn’t ignore. “Every single day we have a new data breach, we have data being leaked,” he explained. “Problems are not solved around data literally lying around in plain text and being vulnerable on a continuous basis and us running and having legacy systems in place.”

The headlines were relentless. Another breach. Another million records exposed. But Ryan saw something deeper—a fundamental architectural flaw in how the world handled data.

Even organizations with sophisticated security still faced the same vulnerability. At some point, to use the data, you had to decrypt it. And that moment created risk.

“Even with new systems, right, problems are not solved,” Ryan said. The industry kept building workarounds, stacking security layers. But the core remained exposed. “Data in plain text in readable form, that problem has not been solved.”

That observation became an obsession.

Nine Years in the Wilderness

What came next wasn’t the typical startup journey. No accelerator. No quick MVP. Just years of grinding through an impossibly hard technical problem.

“We really started around learning how the science and then understanding one, the mathematics around encryption, and two, the science around from a computer science perspective, the hardware and the engineering element, how to potentially solve this problem,” Ryan explained.

The team worked day jobs while spending evenings on cryptography and weekends on engineering. “And that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve been sticking to it, to our guns, working day jobs and at the same time in the evenings, on weekends, working away on how we can solve this.”

This patience wasn’t noble suffering—it was necessity. Fully homomorphic encryption had been theoretical. But making it practical, scalable, and usable with existing tech stacks required breakthroughs in mathematics, computer science, and engineering.

Nine years later: “I’m happy to say we have, and it’s been one incredible journey.”

What They Built

The result challenges everything organizations assume about encryption.

“We allow for the processing of fully randomized encrypted data at scale without ever decrypting data again,” Ryan explained. Organizations can share fully encrypted data, run analytics, process it, search through it—all without converting it to readable form.

“Any organization can use this utilizing their existing tech stacks, utilizing their own databases. We don’t hold any data, we don’t have another, let’s say proxy or workaround solution. We tackle the problem at source and it can scale with an enterprise.”

Ryan describes this as “last millimeter decryption”—the data only becomes readable at the final moment, client-side. “It’s the first fully functioning global, fully homomorphic and searchable encryption technology as such.”

Making People Believe

Solving the technical problem was just the beginning. Now Vaulttree faced convincing people that what they’d built actually exists.

“The biggest challenge definitely is the educational element,” Ryan said. The problem isn’t that organizations don’t want better security. It’s that they don’t believe this level of security is possible.

The skepticism runs deep. CISOs who’ve spent careers in security “know” that you can’t process encrypted data at scale. Vaulttree isn’t just selling a new product—they’re asking customers to update their understanding of what’s possible.

“Every organization that we are talking to, at the beginning, the conversation could be like, oh, we have no use case, or we don’t know, or this doesn’t work, right? But it’s mainly because they don’t understand really that their data and everyone’s data is vulnerable.”

The transformation happens quickly once customers see the technology. “After literally two minutes, it’s like, oh wow, okay, you do this, okay, we can do that, we didn’t even know.”

Building Differently

The nine-year journey shaped how Vaulttree builds the company.

“We are very unique in the way we, for example, bring people into the organization. It’s not your seven interviews and saying, okay, now you’re going to have to write several tests. Actually, we only do two interviews and we tend not to do a test.”

This reflects a principle about potential versus credentials. “One of our cryptographers never studied math, right? And she’s one of our most talented cryptographers.”

The philosophy is simple: “We don’t care what your background is, have you been to which college and for how long and which company? No, we care about people.”

This matters because Vaulttree’s challenge isn’t just technical—it’s translational. They need people who can bridge cryptography and business value, technical breakthroughs and customer problems.

The Future Is Encrypted

Ask Ryan where this goes: “This technology in the space we’re in, right, this is without doubt the future. The future being encrypted. That’s it, literally.”

But the vision extends beyond Vaulttree’s direct success. Ryan sees the company enabling an entire ecosystem.

“The possibilities of what kind of products and what kind of other potential technologies and startups are going to appear around the topic of encrypted data because it becomes now a possibility of building on top of encryption in a way that we could not have done it before. And that is very exciting.”

Vaulttree isn’t just selling a security product. They’re creating the foundation for applications and businesses that can only exist once you can process encrypted data at scale.

What does that future look like? Ryan is honest: “What the future is going to hold, I cannot tell you, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here. But I can tell you definitely it is going to be very interesting.”

The Story Continues

Nine years to solve the technical problem. Now the real work begins: helping the world understand what’s possible and building the ecosystem that will emerge around encrypted data. For founders grinding on hard problems, Vaulttree’s story offers inspiration and warning. The inspiration: genuinely hard problems can be solved with patience. The warning: solving the problem is just the beginning.