11 start-ups shaking up the cybersecurity landscape

With cyberattacks on the rise, companies have been struggling to find new ways to fight back and protect their firms. Here are some start-ups helping them up their defences.

With cybercriminal strategies becoming increasingly sophisticated thanks to advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (and even quantum computing), the need for innovators in this space has never been greater.

While far from an exhaustive list, here are some of our top picks for cybersecurity start-ups in and around Europe (including a few from Ireland) to keep an eye on that have been making waves in their respective fields.

Evervault

This is not the first time that Evervault has featured on our list of Europe’s top cybersecurity start-ups, but the Dublin-based business makes a strong case every time. Backed by some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, including Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, Evervault was founded by former BT Young Scientist winner Shane Curran.

It makes privacy tools for secure cloud hardware across both web and mobile applications, with the aim of taking privacy away from compliance and making it a product feature. Just last week, the cybersecurity start-up expanded into the payments space after launching a new independent payments security platform.

Eye Security

Founded by former Dutch intelligence and security services experts, Eye Security offers cybersecurity protection, incident response and cyber insurance services to mid-market enterprises across the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

Headquartered in the Hague, Eye Security was established in 2020 by Job Kuijpers, Vincent van de Ven and Piet Kerkhofs. It launched an insurance solution in 2022 that made it one of the first European companies to fully secure and insure companies against cyber damage within 24 hours. Most recently, it raised €36m in a Series B round led by JP Morgan.

Getvisibility

Our latest Start-up of the Week, Getvisibility is an Irish cybersecurity start-up that is helping businesses of all sizes identify, classify and protect their sensitive data. Founded by Cork natives Ronan Murphy and Mark Brosnan, it specialises in data security posture management.

“Our AI engine not only excels at traditional data security tasks, but also addresses a critical emerging need: protecting the sensitive data generated by generative AI applications within organisations,” Murphy, who also founded London-listed Smarttech247, told us recently.

Getvisibility raised €10m in Series A funding in March 2022 to accelerate growth in key markets. This came less than a year after it raised more than €2m in a round led by former Eir chief executive Herb Hribar.

HarfangLab

This French cybersecurity start-up offers companies an endpoint detection and response, or EDR, solution to improve the identification and neutralisation of cyberattacks. Founded in 2018 by Grégoire Germain, Xavier Boreau, Mathieu Gaspard and Maxime Rameau, HarfangLab now has more than 250 customers, including government agencies, businesses and international organisations in highly sensitive sectors.

HarfangLab raised €25m in a Series A round last October led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation. It is now looking to expand its market presence in Europe and step up its R&D efforts.

Mitigant.io

Recently mentioned by Sifted as one of the top cybersecurity start-ups to watch according to investors, Mitigant.io is a German company on a mission to simplify security and resilience for enterprise cloud infrastructure.

Co-founders Kennedy Torkura, Nils Karn, and Muhammad Sukmana met at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, while they were conducting research in cloud security and design thinking. Mitigant.io was founded in 2021 and today helps companies manage their cloud in the face of a recent rise in cyberattacks on cloud-native infrastructures.

Nord Security

The cybersecurity company behind NordVPN, one of the world’s most popular virtual private network services, Nord Security has been in the news a lot lately, and for good reasons. In October 2023, the company raised $100m in a financing round led by private equity company Warburg Pincus.

Other products made by Nord Security include password manager NordPass, business-oriented network access security software NordLayer and encrypted cloud storage NordLocker. Following the latest investment, the start-up has been set on expanding its product offering for consumers and businesses and accelerating its growth through strategic mergers and acquisitions.

Oasis Security

Headquartered in New York and with roots in Tel Aviv, Oasis is a cybersecurity start-up that focuses on non-human identity management. Its enterprise platform helps security, engineering and developer teams to improve a company’s security, implement stronger governance and simplify compliance with as little operational complexity as possible.

Founded by Danny Brickman and Amit Zimerman in 2022, Oasis announced earlier this year a $5m seed and a $35m Series A round led by some big names in investing including Sequoia and Accel, as well as Cyberstarts, Maple Capital, Guy Podjarny and Michael Fey. This month, it extended that round with an additional $35m.

Qevlar AI

Another cybersecurity start-up based in Paris, Qevlar AI uses recent advances in artificial intelligence to detect potential cyberattacks and investigate hacks on behalf of businesses. The idea is to protect against the increasing sophistication of phishing attempts that leverage machine learning and AI.

Qevlar AI was founded by Ahmed Achchak and Hamza Sayah just last year. In November, the start-up raised €4.5m in a seed funding round led by EQT Ventures and backed by angels including Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Mehdi Ghissassi (director of product at DeepMind) and Florian Douetteau (CEO of Dataiku).

Quantinuum

The only quantum computing start-up on this list, Quantinuum is the result of a merger between Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions. Based in Cambridge, UK and Colorado, US, the company has built software and hardware products that aim to accelerate the pace of development in the elusive world of quantum computers – with the hope of achieving breakthroughs in areas such as healthcare, materials science, cybersecurity and energy transformation.

Just last month, the Quantinuum and Microsoft made a new quantum breakthrough that significantly reduces error while running experiments. Microsoft said that it used Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware with its new qubit virtualisation system to run more than 14,000 experiments “without a single error”.

Stryve

Founded in 2018, Stryve is one of Ireland’s leading cybersecurity start-ups. Founded in 2018 and based in Carlow, Stryve counts Zevas, Dole PLC, Trustvet, First Ireland, Origina and Typetec among its clients. It is now on a mission to become a global multicloud player with operations in the US, India, South Africa, Morocco, Poland, Ireland and the UK.

Stryve, led by CEO Andrew Tobin, acquired a majority stake in SureDatum and its fintech platform in March of last year. In September, it acquired a majority stake in Futuralis, a US tech consulting firm that helped NASA broadcast the Artemis 1 space mission.

Tines

Named by Sifted as one of the next 10 technology companies to achieve unicorn status in Europe, Tines is an Irish cybersecurity start-up that has developed a no-code platform to automate manual security workloads.

Based in Dublin, the ‘soonicorn’ was founded in 2018 by Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella, who previously worked in security roles at eBay and DocuSign. In October of 2022, it upped its valuation by extending its Series B funding after raising $55m. Just last month, it raised an additional $50m in an extended Series B funding round led by Accel and Felicis.

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