How Cylerity secured its growing fintech infrastructure with Proton VPN
At a glance
Organization profile: Cylerity is an AI-first, financial technology startup that helps healthcare providers manage cash flow. By advancing funds against pending insurance and Medicare reimbursements, it gives healthcare organizations predictable working capital.
Industry: Healthcare | Financial technology
Problem: As Cylerity scaled beyond its founding team, managing individual cloud access permissions manually became an unsustainable burden that threatened to pull focus away from its core mission.
Achievement: With Proton VPN for Business, Cylerity removed a scaling tax. As the company grew, it expanded its infrastructure with dedicated IPs and centralized controls that made manual intervention no longer necessary.
What Cylerity offers customers
Cylerity is a venture-backed fintech company that helps healthcare providers maintain steady cash flow by advancing funds against pending insurance and Medicare reimbursements. With payments usually lagging behind services rendered — sometimes by 30 to 120 days — Cylerity allows providers to operate without waiting months for revenue.
Cylerity plugs directly into real-time billing streams, using predictive models to determine what payers will reimburse, and when. That means handling sensitive healthcare and financial data every day, and making high-stakes funding decisions at speed.
For the providers they serve, Cylerity turns uncertainty into predictability, freeing them to focus on patient care instead of chasing payments.
Why Cylerity chose Proton VPN for Business
Cylerity advances cash against pending reimbursements, so it works directly with sensitive healthcare and financial data. The company connects to real-time billing streams, assesses the value of claims, and advances funds — often within a day.
As Cylerity's team doubled, securing that infrastructure became more complex. What was once manageable through direct oversight quickly turned into a growing burden of access controls and permissions.
Customers increased, funding accelerated expansion, and manual cloud management became unsustainable.
That’s what led Kenneth Penkowski, Chief Product Officer at Cylerity, to look for a VPN.
“We need to stay focused on our customers and on our product — not on managing technology.”
Trust
Penkowski already knew about Proton because he used it personally to protect his own data, and he had been following Proton’s evolution closely.
When it came time to choose a VPN for the business, that familiarity mattered.
They evaluated alternatives, including Microsoft Azure’s internal VPN system. But in the end, the decision came down to trust.
As he put it:
“We trusted that Proton had our best interests as a customer foremost in their mind.”
In an industry where you’re handling sensitive healthcare data and moving six-figure sums, that trust wasn’t abstract. It meant confidence that security would never be an afterthought.
Security
As the team expanded across multiple regions — including North Carolina, Wisconsin, and offshore locations — Cylerity ran into a challenge familiar to many scaling businesses: How do you lock down infrastructure without slowing secure access for a distributed team?
By gating internal systems behind Proton VPN, Cylerity centralized access control at the network layer. This reduced the need for complex, system-by-system permission configurations and made it easier to demonstrate access restrictions during SOC 2 audits.
As Penkowski put it:
“Connecting to Proton VPN gives me that little bit more confidence.”
And when you’re handling sensitive data, that margin of confidence matters.
Usability
Cylerity had a clear litmus test: Could someone without deep technical expertise manage users and resources without weakening security? The answer was yes.
The rollout was so seamless that leadership barely noticed it happening. When they asked the tech team when Proton VPN would go live, they discovered it had already been running for two weeks.
The apps worked across Mac and Windows. Team members downloaded, connected to dedicated servers, and got to work.
Onboarding new hires became straightforward: a download link shared, credentials issued, an MFA setup completed. Access granted.
“I haven’t heard a single person have any problem with it,” Penkowski noted."
Frictionless adoption keeps a growing company focused on building — not troubleshooting.
Affordability
Proton hit the sweet spot: Trust built through experience, usability that removed IT overhead, and pricing aligned with the realities of a scaling fintech. But none of that would have mattered if security had required trade-offs.
At Cylerity’s stage of growth, every dollar is deliberate, every security decision carries risk. The solution had to protect both.
“At our stage in growth, we can’t overspend — but we also can’t under-secure. Proton let us avoid that trade-off,” Penkowski said."
For a company advancing six-figure sums against sensitive healthcare claims, affordability isn’t about cutting costs. It’s about investing wisely without compromising what matters most.
How Cylerity uses Proton
With Proton VPN, Cylerity removed access-management complexity, secured its expanding cloud environment, and empowered a distributed team to operate with confidence.
Implementation snapshot
- All sensitive Azure environments are accessible only via Proton VPN
- Access is enforced primarily through IP allowlisting
- Team members connect using dedicated VPN access before reaching internal resources
- Deployment required only IP whitelist updates and client installation
- VPN-gated access supports least-privilege access management across a distributed dev team
That foundation allows Cylerity to stay focused on accelerating payments for healthcare providers instead of managing the systems behind them.
Want to learn how Proton VPN can give your business infrastructure that disappears into the background so innovation becomes your foreground? View our plans or contact our sales team.