SEKOIA, a French deeptech company specialising in cyber threat anticipation, has just completed its first round of funding of EUR10 million euros with Omnes and Alliance Entreprendre. The investment will be mainly devoted to accelerating the marketing of its platform for its European public and private companies and to strengthening its R&D teams.
Founded in 2008, SEKOIA has built its reputation on its expertise in responding to security incidents and its ability to assist companies under attack. Since 2016, the company is evolving towards software publishing with the aim of meeting a need that is still little covered by European cybersecurity companies: threat intelligence. This modern defensive approach was concretized by the launch in January 2020 of the SEKOIA.IO platform.
A single company motto: to offer a European alternative to the American SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) products available on the market with a sovereign threat anticipation and detection solution.
“We are today raising funds to promote a European and collective approach to threat intelligence,” says Freddy Milesi, CEO and co-founder of SEKOIA. “The challenges that are facing companies and all those involved in cyber security in the years to come are colossal. In order to remain in the race against cybercriminals, SEKOIA has chosen to focus on two complementary pillars to enable companies to increase the effectiveness of their protections: anticipation of threats and automation of defences.”
After being self-financed for more than 10 years, SEKOIA has chosen to raise funds to develop its sales force and strengthen its R&D teams. To do so, SEKOIA selected 2 investors with expertise in deeptech and cybersecurity, having faith in the approach promoted by the company: an innovative and sovereign solution – a European alternative to the solutions on the market.
“Our choice of investment is in line with our ambition: to invest in the creation of Europe’s future major technology companies. SEKOIA has all the qualities to achieve this: a very high level of management with recognized expertise in cybersecurity, a state-of-the-art product and an ambitious technological roadmap, in a rapidly growing market. With this support, we are convinced that SEKOIA will become one of the major French players in cybersecurity, with a global reach,” says Fabien Collangettes, Director of Investments at Omnes.
“We were seduced by the quality of the team and SEKOIA’s unique expertise in Threat Intelligence. The company was able to capitalise on its historical service offering to design a next-generation technological solution, combining the agility of the Cloud and the power of threat detection, based on contextualised indicators. With this approach, SEKOIA.IO is able to provide support to companies of all sizes in their cyber defence strategy. We are delighted to support the company in its development alongside Omnes,” says Benoît Thiedey and Sébastien Viou, respectively Investment Director and Operating Partner at Alliance Entreprendre.
With 80 employees and a panel of customers including companies of all sizes, the company plans to recruit 20 to 30 additional profiles in data scientist and sales engineer positions over the next six months, bringing the workforce to more than 100 people.
