Lausanne-headquartered Saporo is announcing a pre-seed fundraise to the tune of €4 million to grow its cybersecurity offer with a focus on protecting healthcare, banking and insurance IT systems.
The round is led by Franco-German VC XAnge with participation from Session VC and Lightbird Ventures.
Saporo's cybersecurity software-led service is used by IT professionals to try out cyber defences against hypothetical attacks and adjust user account privileges automatically, reducing the scope for attackers to capitalise.
Once an organisation's attack surface has been probed, the Saporo platform builds data on the web of relationships that link computers, user accounts and assets to identify various entry points for attackers, using graph theory and artificial intelligence.
Cybersecurity professor Éric Blavier helped establish Saporo with the help of his fellow two co-founders, the siblings duo Olivier and Guillaume Eyries.
Their hard work paid off in January 2022 with the official product launch, and the company now wants to grab a market foothold serving SMEs with up to 30,000 employees.
With their platform, the Eyries have tried to bring some of the skillsets typically thought of as being specialised cybersecurity knowledge to a product that also works for general IT administrators and business application owners, who might lack in-depth expertise.
By broadening the knowledge pool, Saporo wants to reassure businesses they can keep IT protected and tackle the cybersecurity meltdown that's seen various critical systems dependent on IT and connectivity affected.
"Security cannot remain a security expert problem only," says Eyries, "We need to empower teams who build and make changes daily to consider the security impact of their decision and help them secure systems by design,"
Speaking on behalf of Lightbird Ventures, managing partner Benjamin Solenthaler said there were case studies of Saporo's solution where organisations had achieved an 80% reduction in their "internal attack surface".
Session VC founding partner Martin Altorfer added: "Today, too many issues seem to make the shortlist of priorities for most organizations.
"However, strengthening the defense is imperative, especially when situations and technology change daily.
"Saporo takes the hardest part of the job away, giving customers the data and recommendations to act now by prioritizing the risk. We believe this incredibly powerful solution will make a profound change in assessing risks.”
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments