Cybersecurity start-up 4Securitas raises €2m from Italian VC fund

Irish cybersecurity company 4Securitas has secured €2 million in investment from an Italian state-backed venture capital fund.

4Securitas, which was founded by Stefan Umit Uygur and Donal Kerr in 2017, has received the funding from Cysero, a new fund that is raising up to €100 million to invest in companies in the robotics and cybersecurity space.

4Securitas’s other backers include French cybersecurity services company iTrust and Enterprise Ireland.

The company is behind ACSIA (Automated Cyber Security Interactive Application), a cybersecurity defence system that uses artificial intelligence to monitor and capture intrusion attempts by both automated hacking tools and manual techniques.

Speaking to The Irish Times, Mr Uygur said its solution allows companies to manage security risk without the need of specialist staff. The product captures all external or internal intrusion attempts in real-time by “thinking like a hacker does”.

Bank robbery

“Almost all cybersecurity software currently available is reactive. They are designed to trigger once there is a problem rather than beforehand so it is very much like an alarm going off when a bank robbery is already in progress. At that stage it is too late as you are already compromised,” said Mr Uygur.

“We’re focused on thinking about what it is that an intruder is likely to do to try and get into a system, and in reality there are only a limited number of steps they can and will take, so once you spot patterns then you can work out what they will do before they do it,” he added.

The majority of 4Securitas’s clients are in Italy, where Mr Uygur comes from originally, but it is now looking to expand into other markets quickly on the back of the investment.

ACSIA is particularly suitable for small and medium-sized companies – a market segment typically ignored by larger software companies – as it doesn’t require the need of skilled IT professionals to manage it.

“The market is huge for us,” said Mr Uygur. “I really think we will be become a decacorn (a company valued at over $10 billion) once the world figures out just how good our technology is at staving off cybersecurity attacks.”