Saporo, a Lausanne, Switzerland-based AI-cybersecurity startup, announced that it has secured €4M funding in a seed round led by XAnge (also invested in Valuecase) with participation from previous investors Session VC and Lightbird Ventures.
The Swiss company will use the funds to grow its team, expand the product and bring it to more countries and markets across Europe. The announcement comes ten months after raising a pre-seed investment of €2.6M in January.
“Security cannot remain a security expert problem only. 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,” says Olivier Eyries, co-founder and CEO.
Cybersecurity platform
Founded by brothers, Olivier and Guillaume Eyries, and cybersecurity professor Éric Blavier, Ph.D., Saporo enables organisations to increase cyber resistance by prioritising and reducing user access risk.
Using AI and graph technologies to analyse configuration and user access data, Saporo scores organisations’ resistance to attacks and finds the most impactful changes to increase cyber resistance.
As per the company’s claims, analysis of multiple customers using their product has shown an attack surface reduction of up to 80 percent within three months.
The company does this by the product stress-tests user and system access risks.
Further, the Swiss company said it has built products for security practitioners, IT administrators, and business application owners.
Saporo claims that it has tripled its customer base. The startup now serves companies with teams between 500 and 30,000 employees in healthcare, banking, and insurance.
Currently, Saporo employs around 22 people from 9 different countries.
Nicolas Rose, Managing Partner at XAnge says, “We believe that preventive cybersecurity measures will become the new normal for companies around the globe. We are excited to back the Saporo team and their strong conviction that IT security can be greatly improved by being prepared using advanced software that mimics attacks. Their combination of Artificial Intelligence with a simplified user experience will be the foundation for the teams’ next chapter: helping hundreds of companies protect their business from an ever-increasing flood of cyberattacks.”
Benjamin Solenthaler, the Managing Partner at Lightbird, says, “We’re already seeing a considerable impact being made on the businesses using Saporo’s solution – with some customers seeing an 80 percent reduction of their internal attack surface in one single day! With Saporo, all organizations can get ahead of any future cyber problem and be better equipped against attacks. We’re excited to even further back the team and see the company grow in 2023 and beyond.”
Martin Altorfer, Founding Partner of Session VC, says, “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 prioritising the risk. We believe this incredibly powerful solution will profoundly change assessing risks.”
