Switzerland is booming into a tech hub and as many as 15 startups from the region participated in the CES 2022 recently. Now, Saporo, a Swiss cybersecurity startup, works with companies to measure their resistance against cyber attacks. Also, the company lowers their risk quickly with the least business disruption.
$2.7M investment
Today, Saporo has grabbed $2.7 million in pre-seed funding in a round co-led by Session VC and Lightbird Ventures. The company will use the investment to make it easier for businesses of any size to increase their cyber resistance. Also, it eyes to expand the team to 12 in 2022 with key hires being made in security research, data science, and engineering development. Furthermore, it will use the financing for product development, exploring new markets and growing the customer base.
“Saporo does the heavy lifting so any business can rapidly improve its security,” said Olivier Eyries, Co-Founder and CEO of Saporo. “At the moment, defenders are losing the race against cyber attackers. Current methods for testing weaknesses in infrastructure are slow, labour-intensive, and take up too many resources. That’s where Saporo comes in.”
Benjamin Solenthaler, the Managing Partner at Lightbird, added, “We’re already seeing a considerable impact being made on the businesses using Saporo’s solution – with some customers seeing an 80 percent improvement in one single day! With Saporo, all organisations can get ahead of any future cyber problem and be better equipped against attacks. We’re excited to back the team and see the company grow in 2022 and beyond.”
Martin Altorfer, Founding Partner of Session VC, concluded, “Today, for most organisations, too many issues seem to make the shortlist of priorities. However, strengthening the defence 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. This is an incredibly powerful solution and one we believe will make a profound change in assessing risks.”
How does it work?
Defenders can never hope to get ahead of attackers if attackers have a better understanding of the organisation’s own network. By leveraging the techniques used by threat actors to visualise the most critical paths to critical resources, defenders can see their environment as attackers do. Once visibility is achieved, it becomes much easier to anticipate attack paths and implement the appropriate countermeasures and controls. This is what Saporo aims to do with its technology.
Its technology measures the security impact and exploitability of system configurations in a continuous manner. It measures the effort needed for attackers to compromise resources. Also, it lets organisations identify and prioritise paths that attackers might take for various attacks such as ransomware.
It hosts stress-tests proactively on user and system access risks before attackers can exploit them. With this approach, the cybersecurity firm enables any organisation to model and measure the resistance to anticipate attacks and make better-informed decisions about managing the risk.
Saporo uses AI-driven analysis and graph theory to test an organisation’s attack surface, and the relationships between assets, users, and computers against millions of threat scenarios. Also, Saporo helps organisations move to the cloud safely. It supports Microsoft AD and Azure with AWS, GCP, Okta and IaaS integrated by the end of 2022.
Cybersecurity accessible to all!
Cybersecurity startup Saporo was launched in April 2021 after several months of research and development. It was founded by brothers Olivier and Guillaume Eyries alongside researcher Éric Blavier. With shared experiences from previous businesses and working in cybersecurity, they work with the vision to make cybersecurity accessible to all organisations.
Already, Saporo works with healthcare, banking, and insurance businesses. A sample of French hospitals using this technology has shown an average attack surface reduction of 70-90 percent within three months.
Jean-Baptise Gard, an IT Engineer for Network Infrastructure at the Saint-Quentin Hospital Center, and a Saporo customer said, “Saporo is an indispensable solution in the fight against and prevention of next-generation cyber-attacks. The solution made us aware that our active directory (AD) design was no longer in line with current risks by auditing our AD directory differently from other tools. In particular, Saporo’s technology was able to list the various attack paths that we had no visibility of until now. All of the information provided allowed us to address the security issues related to AD.”
