Copenhagen’s cybersecurity platform Muninn raises €2.5 million

There are cybersecurity platforms, and then there are cybersecurity platforms that have origins tied to M.I.T and the building of the cyber defense for critical infrastructure on behalf of the Danish Defense Intelligence Service. 

Such is the case with Copenhagen-based Muninn, which has raised €2.5 million in a seed round led by Luminar Ventures. Pointing to strong traction figures, Muninn intends to use the investment to continue further development of its product, while simultaneously sustaining commercial growth.

If you’re reading this article, I’m going to assume that you need no introduction to just how critical cybersecurity services are, and how offense and defense seem to be involved in a never-ending game of cat and mouse. While the Twillio incident widely reported last week originated as a phishing attack, the severity of the breach only further illustrates my point.

With a nod to its Norse heritage, Huginn and Muninn were a pair of ravens that traversed Midgard reporting back what news to Odin, Muninn’s AI-driven platform oversees clients’ entire digital infrastructure and isn’t playing the defense game, but rather, an offense against the offense one.

By leveraging data from historical attacks to detect known threats, and recognising and learning certain network patterns and behaviours, Muninn is able to build a model of a client's normal network behaviors. Anything out of the ordinary or statistically probable, and Muninn starts raising the red flags, and in a hurry. Being able to proactively predict, track, and block network threats, the startup isn’t just holding the line in an attack, but rearranging its forces before a nefarious actor even arrives at the front door.

“Our machine learning approach to stopping data leakage by tracking hackers that sneak under the radar, minimising false positives, and automatically suggesting actions to respond to threats, puts us at a significant advantage when compared to traditional cybersecurity tools,” explained Muninn founder and CEO Andreas Frederik Wehowsky. 

So impressive is Muninn’s offer that the startup has doubled its customer base and reports tripling its revenues in the first six months of this year, due in part to winning a €15 million tender from the Danish Health Authority.

It’s the winning combination of strong traction and a powerful and much-needed product that’s drawn the attention of lead investor Luminar Ventures, with previous investor PreSeed Ventures (PSV) also returning to the table to show their support.

“We invest in unique talents, and in Andreas, we have found a trailblazer that combines a very credible cyber security background, with a deep understanding of machine learning technologies.  The accelerating demand for threat detection and prevention tools is clear to see, particularly as companies and governments prepare for a new era of cybercrime, and a higher volume of real network threats. Muninn’s unique ability to predict and diagnose these threats, and automatically suggest which actions to take, is a total game-changer in this environment, as we can see in their propelling growth over the last 6-12 months,” concluded Luminar Ventures’ Jacob Key.