Graph-based security analysis start-up raises €3m in funding round led by Notion Capital

●      Cyscale’s ‘Security Knowledge Graph™’ provides contextual analysis, reducing false positives, and prioritizing high-risk items

●      Offers cyber-security for a shifting paradigm in organizations’ server infrastructure

●      The funding will be used to grow the team and enable international expansion

Cyscale, a graph-based cloud security analysis company, today announces the successful completion of a €3m funding round.

The round was led by Notion Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, GapMinder, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, previously founder of Wercker and now Fiberplane and NP-Hard Ventures; and David Mytton, founder of Console.dev and Server Density.

Within most modern infrastructures, all cyber assets are interconnected, generating a massive digital footprint for organizations. Understanding risk is therefore of critical importance. It can make the difference between a security programme that works, and alert fatigue that burdens security and development teams.

Manuela Ticudean, co-founder of Cyscale, explains, “The cybersecurity industry needs to shift toward understanding cyber risk in context. Only then will we be able to fight the increasingly sophisticated and advanced threats targeting our organizations and our lives.”

“Most cloud security tools analyze cloud infrastructures by running through sets of configuration best practices and verifying them against each cloud resource,” she continues. “This approach can be useful, but the problem is the rate of false positives. Looked at in isolation, a resource may be misconfigured, but there are other contextual factors that determine the actual danger for a business. False positives create noise and keep security engineers from focusing on the highest-risk issues. As a result, businesses waste valuable time and risk becoming the victims of cyber-attacks.”

Cyscale co-founder, Ovidiu Cical, adds, “Security risks aren’t limited to an organization’s cloud infrastructure. Adjacent components such as third-party software packages used in applications, software development practices, and code repositories are all examples of risk areas in modern tech ecosystems. Most of the time, companies assess risk in each of these areas in isolation, based on skillsets in the team or available resources. The result is a fragmented security function, with no clear understanding where weaknesses lie and what their impact truly is.

Cyscale aims to fix this situation by building a comprehensive ‘Security Knowledge Graph™’ for an organization, ingesting data from multiple sources and generating an in-depth contextual analysis for each of its cloud assets. Leaving no risk or misconfiguration uncovered, it allows security teams to prioritize the remediation of high-risk issues. In addition, Cyscale has built a powerful compliance module that helps security leaders track gaps between any policies they’ve defined and their technical implementations in the cloud.

Cyscale co-founder, Ovidiu Cical continues,“We are excited. Our solution is applicable to a universe of challenges relating to cybersecurity contextualisation, and we are standing in front of a great opportunity to work with a huge number of companies, and to scale quickly and effectively. We look forward to continuing our rapid growth”

Kamil Mieczakowski, principal at Notion Capital, says of investing in Cyscale, “Over the past five years, we’ve witnessed a paradigm shift in how enterprises run their server infrastructures. But the cybersecurity industry hasn’t kept up. We’re really excited to be partnering with Manuela, Ovidiu, and the Cyscale team as they develop what we see as the most compelling cloud visibility and control platform for the modern enterprise.”

Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Managing Partner at Seedcamp, adds, “The experience of Cyscale’s founders speaks for itself. Both Manuela and Ovidiu are highly skilled and highly valued members of the cybersecurity community. Their belief in the importance of context in cybersecurity analysis is a vital step in ensuring the effective and precise protection of an organization’s cloud infrastructure.”

Dan Mihăescu, Founding Partner GapMinder BV: "We are happy to follow on and invest further into Cyscale. It is an important phase in the company's development, doing a lot of international steps, maturing the platform, and preparing for further scaling up outside Europe to the US and Asia. From the early beginnings, we believed in the team and we continue to support their further growth to achieve their vision of becoming a leader in cloud cybersecurity."

Founded in Romania in 2019, the company raised €350,000 on SeedBlink in 2021, ensuring sufficient working capital for 12 months for a small team of passionate and driven people.