Ionic Security Inc. became the latest startup to catch the wave of investor interest in enterprise privacy protection on Tuesday after raising a healthy $40.1 million to lay down the groundwork for its imminent launch. The team hasn’t revealed much about exactly what it’s working on, but the long list of high-profile backers hints at something promising.

The venerable Meritech Capital Partners led the new funding round, with Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Tech Operators and Jafco Ventures chipping in to increase their existing stakes. The investment comes a month and a half after two other data security startups – CipherCloud Inc. and Veradocs Inc. – secured their own financing barely a day apart.

The three firms are pursuing the same goal of helping organizations protect their data more effectively as employees move more of their work to mobile devices and cloud services situated beyond the range of traditional policy enforcement mechanisms. But based on the few snippets of information available on Ion’s technology, it’s is taking a more nuanced strategy than its rivals with a solution that is potentially as just useful behind the corporate firewall as off-premise.

Founder Adam Ghetti divulged to TechCrunch last February that the startup is developing a distributed encryption protocol similar to BitCoin in design. According to a separate interview Ghetti gave to the Wall Street Journal this week, it’s apparently based on the same concept of a decentralized ledger that is synchronized among users in order to ensure that only the rightful owner of a particular file can decrypt it.

That allows organizations to control their data regardless of where it is while rendering useless any data attackers seize. As a result, practically the only way a malicious party can access information encrypted with the software is to steal the private keys to the sought-after files, which Ion enables customers to keep in the safety of their on-premise environments.

That’s one of the several logistical benefits of the technology for the large enterprises that the startup is targeting. The protocol also eliminates the need for setting up network gateways such as the kind Veradocs and Bitglass Inc., another recently funded cloud security startup, rely on to encrypt files on their way outside the corporate firewall.

The unique approach that Ionic has developed toward protecting enterprise data could potentially put it in a stronger long-term position than some of its more established competitors, which have a great deal of functional overlap among their services. The startup’s high-profile investors are apparently banking on that to help make up for its late entry into the game.

The round brings Ionic’s total raised to over $78 million. Mike Gordon of Meritech Capital Partners is joining the board as part of the investment.