Participated · Series B · Feb 2023

CyberSmart offers an all-in-one platform (Active Protect) that provides baseline endpoint security, continuous monitoring, user training/certification and a bundled cyber insurance policy. The insurance is provided in partnership with Aviva and Superscript and only activates once customers follow the prescribed security steps. The product is targeted at very small SMEs (average customer size 10–50 employees) and is distributed primarily through channel partners. CyberSmart reports about 4,000 U.K. customers, with 1,800 taking its insurance product. The company plans to use new funding to further develop the product, pursue potential acquisitions, and expand channel partners and customers in the U.K., Europe, Australia and New Zealand. CyberSmart was incubated at a GCHQ accelerator; Jamie Akhtar is co-founder and CEO and the business is six years old. CyberSmart provides a cybersecurity platform aimed at helping SMBs combat cyber-attacks and comply with rising regulation. The company was born out of a GCHQ accelerator in 2017 and was created by a group of security experts. Led by CEO Jamie Akhtar, CyberSmart focuses on simplifying information security for companies that lack financial or human resources. The platform helps businesses achieve information security standards that many find too complicated to reach on their own. CyberSmart raised funding to expand its operations and business reach. The articles state the company raised a Series A to support that growth. CyberSmart provides a machine-learning platform that automatically checks, fixes and certifies SMEs for Cyber Essentials compliance, enabling same-day certification and reducing time and cost to hours. The platform maintains 24/7 compliance across devices, including laptops and mobile, and aims to simplify a typically complex manual process for smaller businesses. The company was founded in 2017 by Jamie Akhtar and Mariella Thanner and was selected for the first GCHQ accelerator, gaining access to government tenders and an international partner network. CyberSmart has secured £1.3 million in new financing led by IQ Capital. The funding is intended to allow the company to scale within the British market and invest in technical capability. Users such as Legal Edge praise the platform's simplicity, scalability, and responsive support.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2021

SenseOn provides a cloud-based, AI-powered cybersecurity platform that triangulates data from endpoints, networks and microservices to increase accuracy and speed of detection and response. The company builds core platform components and apps while integrating and organizing data from other security tools. Founder and CEO David Atkinson, formerly of Darktrace and the U.K. Ministry of Defence, leads the London-based team. SenseOn counts financial services firms, consumer businesses and government organizations among its customers. The business has seen strong commercial growth, with revenues and engagements up over 350%. The platform approach aims to consolidate fragmented point solutions into more complete security pictures and actionable data. Senseon offers an AI-powered cyber defence platform built around an 'AI triangulation' system that is designed to learn and adapt to organisations' network environments. The system was developed by founder David Atkinson, who served as the first cyber operative within the UK’s specialist military units. Senseon positions its technology to separate genuine cybersecurity threats from benign noise that can confuse traditional tools. The article highlights the platform's adaptive learning approach as a response to increasingly complex networks and attacker innovation. Senseon has recently raised $6.4 million, providing capital to support its product and operations.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2019

Exonar develops a platform that discovers an organisation’s most sensitive, valuable and personal information by plugging into a network to provide an instant view of both structured and unstructured data. The product enables creation of inventories, security of sensitive data and regulatory compliance across large enterprise information estates. Exonar targets enterprises that can hold petabytes of data and addresses growing challenges in data volume and risk. Management says the investment will be used to further enhance the Exonar platform. CEO and Founder Adrian Barrett said enhancements will help customers meet current and future data demands such as GDPR and CCPA swiftly, simply and at scale. The article notes analyst estimates that the global data governance software market will grow 22% annually to $3.5bn by 2023. Exonar offers a big-data architecture that uses advanced search, language processing and machine learning to map and interpret an organisation’s data. Its product identifies issues and reduces risk to help clients address EU GDPR requirements. The company is led by founder and CEO Adrian Barrett and is based in London, UK. Exonar intends to use the new capital to expand the availability of its EU GDPR compliance solutions. To date the company has received £3.3m in funding. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2018

Tessian provides machine‑learning driven human‑layer security designed to predict and stop advanced email threats caused by human error, such as data exfiltration, accidental data loss, business email compromise and phishing. The platform operates with minimal disruption to employee workflows. The company says it will use the new funding to expand its platform beyond email to secure other interfaces, including messaging, web and collaboration platforms. Tessian is led by CEO and co‑founder Tim Sadler. Founded in 2013, the company has offices in London, San Francisco and Boston. Prior backers include Sequoia, Accel, March Capital and Balderton Capital. Tessian applies machine learning to model individual employee email behavior and automatically flag or stop risky patterns indicative of phishing, data exfiltration, or other social-engineering attacks. The product is positioned as a replacement for legacy secure email gateways and data loss prevention solutions, with capabilities designed to protect the human layer in enterprise email. Tessian reported around 350 global customers across legal, financial services, healthcare and technology, and said it tripled its Fortune 500-level customer base over the past year. The company plans to expand beyond email to provide protections for messaging, web and collaboration platforms. New funding will be used to expand platform capabilities and grow the team — Tessian plans to triple headcount with particular emphasis on expanding its North America sales organization. The startup was founded in 2013 and is U.K.-based. Tessian’s core product is a machine-learning security platform that analyzes historical email data to understand normal communication patterns and detect anomalies that indicate threats like spear phishing and misdirected emails. The company serves a global customer base across legal, financial, technology and healthcare sectors, with customers including Clifford Chance, Dentons, Schroders, Investec and Rightmove. Led by CEO and co-founder Tim Sadler, Tessian aims to reduce human-related enterprise email vulnerabilities. The company raised $42m in a Series B to support growth. Tessian plans to use the funds to accelerate expansion in the U.S. and other global markets and to invest in R&D to expand its product line in 2019. Tessian develops machine-intelligence software that protects enterprises' email by learning normal and abnormal sending patterns and warning users about anomalous outgoing messages before they are sent. After installation its technology analyzes enterprise email networks to detect anomalies and prevent mistakes or breaches. The company serves customers including Schroders, Man Group and Dentons, and over 70 of the UK's leading law firms use the platform. Tessian has a team of about 50 people. It plans to use the new funding to expand its product offering and grow the business by increasing the size of its sales and marketing teams.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2018

Panaseer offers a Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform that correlates large volumes of data from disparate security tools to validate protections, identify failed controls, and surface exposures such as zero-day or vendor-specific vulnerabilities. The company positions CCM as a way to continuously measure and notify organizations of control failures so they can be remediated before becoming incidents. CEO Jonathan Gill says the funding will be used to scale the organization, expand implementation teams, and evolve the product to support more use cases. Panaseer targets regulated organizations or complex enterprises with assets worth protecting, a market the company describes as tens of thousands of organizations. Leadership and customers believe only a very small number of companies can currently solve this data-science–heavy problem, and Panaseer aims to broaden access. Financially, the company has raised $43 million to date following the latest round. Panaseer provides a platform that uses proprietary algorithms to perform entity resolution and create an accurate view of an organisation's assets, such as devices, applications and people. It continuously measures the security of those assets by automatically analysing data from the myriad of security technologies deployed, giving stakeholders a live view of risk through a common framework such as the NIST. The platform delivers analysis for a range of security use cases, including smart device inventory, vulnerability management, patch management, endpoint protection and privileged access management. Panaseer was founded in 2014 by CEO Nik Whitfield and is based on South Bank, London. It has 33 employees across two offices in London and New York. The company secured $10M in a Series A round in June 2018. Panaseer, founded in 2014 by CEO Nik Whitfield, is a London, UK-based cybersecurity data analytics company. It provides a big data analytics software platform designed to automate identification, measurement, communication and mitigation of cyber risk. The Panaseer Security Data Lake gives data-driven CISOs continuous visibility and automated reporting capability to optimize cyber hygiene and rapidly answer cyber risk questions from executives and regulators. Clients include the world’s largest financial institutions and critical infrastructure enterprises. Earlier this year the company opened its first international office in New York. Panaseer raised $3.25m in its latest round and intends to use the capital to expand into US and European markets; total funding to date is $5.6m. Panaseer provides a platform that ingests and analyzes data from disparate cybersecurity solutions and presents a visual interface for drilling into that information. The product is designed to help executives and boards understand security posture and prioritize budget and policy changes. Founded in 2014 by Nik Whitfield, the company serves major UK financial services customers and critical infrastructure enterprises. Panaseer secured $2.25M in seed funding and will use the proceeds to expand adoption of its solution. As part of its growth plans, the company is expanding to New York City.