Irish start-up 4Securitas nets €2m Italian investment

14 Sep 2021

Image: © peshkov /Stock.adobe.com

The company plans to use the funding to bring its AI-powered security tools to new markets.

Irish cybersecurity start-up 4Securitas has secured a €2m investment from an Italian venture capital firm, the Irish Times reported.

The capital comes from Cysero, a €100m fund announced last year that specialises in cybersecurity, AI and robotics, operated by investment firm AVM Gestioni. The Cysero fund is a backer of RoboIT, the Italian technology transfer hub for robotics in Rome.

Dublin-based 4Securitas was founded by Donal Kerr and Stefan Umit Uygur in 2017. Its flagship product is the Automated Cybersecurity Interactive Application (ACSIA), which is designed to “complement a traditional perimeter security model” and “stop cyberthreats at the pre-attack phase”.

ACSIA uses AI to analyse a company’s systems for potential attack vectors. It also tracks the behaviour of users and employees, detecting patterns of usage that differ from the norm, to flag as potential security issues.

4Securitas emphasises the tool’s ease of use, with CEO Uygur having described it in a previous interview as requiring “only basic IT skills” and being “user-friendly, simple to deploy and intuitive to operate”.

The company’s existing backers include Enterprise Ireland and French cybersecurity outlet iTrust.

The Irish Times reports that many 4Securitas clients are in Italy, where Uygur is from. However, the start-up plans to use the new investment to expand into other markets.

“The market is huge for us,” Uygur told the publication. “I really think we will be become a decacorn [a start-up valued at $10bn] once the world figures out just how good our technology is at staving off cybersecurity attacks.”

Kerr, who is the company’s CAO, formerly worked at Twitter. John Long, a co-founder and former CTO of Evros-acquired tech company Sabeo, serves as 4Securitas’ COO.

In 2020, Siliconrepublic.com named 4Securitas as one of 100 start-ups to watch in Europe.

Jack Kennedy is a freelance journalist based in Dublin

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