Bitcasa CEO Explains How Their Encryption Works

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Bitcasa, a new cloud storage provider, was met with a healthy dose of skepticism last week when it claimed to be able to provide “infinite storage.”  How does it do that? It can’t do what it promises! That’s not how encryption works! And so on. VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, along with First Round Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund have invested $1.3 million in the technology, which seems to suggest there’s valuable IP behind the startup’s overly broad promises of cheap, infinite and secure storage.

My initial review of the startup was generally positive because, by all descriptions, it’s doing something innovative and new. While we raised a few general questions (does it slow you down?, will it scale?), it’s hard to review something without going hands-on. For that matter, describing the way the technology works was perhaps overly simplified. For those of you with interest in deeper technical details, here they are (well, it’s a start, at least…).

As a finalist, Bitcasa got drilled by knowledgeable judges including Ron Conway, Hadi Partovi, Marissa Mayer, Roelof Botha, Matthew Cohler and Arrington. Hadi Partovi was on the founding teams of Tellme and iLike. As an angel investor and startup advisor, Hadi’s portfolio includes Facebook, Zappos, Dropbox, OPOWER, Flixster, Bluekai, and many others. Like you, he wanted to know how Bitcasa’s encryption worked.