By Ken Schachter

Document security firm Workshare has closed on a $23-million funding round from Steelpoint Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and Quester, the company said Friday.

Roy Thiele-Sardina, managing director at Menlo Park, California-based Steelpoint, will take a board seat at London-based Workshare in the wake of the funding that will help the company expand to new global markets.

“We sought the dream team in information security with the operational savvy and global reach required to win in a rapidly expanding market,” Joe Fantuzzi, chief executive of San Francisco-based Workshare, said in a statement.

Document security is a growing concern for companies whose workers often use consumer-grade personal email accounts or instant messaging to transfer sensitive documents. Companies fear that corporate secrets could leak out or that employee or customer data could be compromised.

Healthcare providers in the United States, for instance, are required by law to shield patient information.

Nine-year-old Workshare has 130 employees and 5,500 customers, including 62 percent of the Fortune 1000, according to company statistics.

Digital Shredding

Workshare offers a suite that integrates with Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF (portable document format) files and operates in the background, letting workers digitally shred the data hidden in a document and check for content policy compliance. The software also assesses the content risk of each document to be sent and alerts users to policy violations.

Sean Cunningham, director of strategic investments at Intel Capital, said that Workshare addressed some of the most pressing business issues.

“The investment in Workshare is based on its global reach, broad industry alliances, and secure content compliance technology across both endpoints and networks,” he said in a statement.