Titans24 co-founder and CEO Mateusz Romanów. Image: Titans24
Our Start-up of the Week is Titans24, a security-as-a-service platform designed to protect SME enterprise data.
Based in Wrocław, Poland, Titans24 is a cybersecurity start-up co-founded by CEO Mateusz Romanów. Prior to starting the infosec business, Romanów was head of business at a creative agency called 25wat.
With a portfolio of 240 clients in six countries, Romanów quickly became aware of the need for accessible cybersecurity for those clients and other businesses that use the internet to communicate with existing and potential customers.
“In 10 years of leading my creative agency, I’ve seen enough neglect in the digital security sphere among the clients we served in Poland and abroad,” he told Siliconrepublic.com.
“I spoke to CEOs and many admitted that they [would] fortify their cybersecurity if somebody could do that for them at a good price. It just wasn’t an immediate priority for them.”
As well as his creative and cybersecurity ventures, Romanów also co-founded Arbuzz, which is one of Poland’s first augmented reality applications.
‘My challenge is to bring the human-centred design aspect into the technology we produce, so the platform is seen as adaptable regardless of the confusion that the subject of cybersecurity might bring to some’
– MATEUSZ ROMANÓW
The basics
When asked to described Titans24 in a nutshell, Romanów said that, first and foremost, the start-up was founded to protect businesses from cyberattacks.
“Titans24 is a security-as-a-service platform for SMEs that host web services, data and documents. [We protect these files] in containers with 11 active protection layers. Think of it as a digital bank vault.”
For now, the start-up is targeting European businesses. “Our niche in the $4.5bn e-commerce market is where SMEs require enterprise-level data protection that costs less than single cloud solutions from AWS, Azure or IBM Security,” Romanów continued.
“Titans24 was designed for those responsible for maintaining web services and web applications – non-technical business owners and also system admins, web developers and freelancers. There are at least 23m companies in the European Union that we can connect with.”
However, he added that it can be challenging to be present in two dimensions at once – the user dimension and the technological dimension. “Our users, who are often non-technical company owners, would rather stay away from the technological world.
“My everyday challenge is to bring the human-centred design aspect into the technology we produce, so that the platform is seen as adaptable regardless of the confusion that the subject of cybersecurity might bring to some.”
The technology behind Titans24
Romanów believes that “everyone has digital resources that must be secured”, and that Titans24 will be able to stand out from other cybersecurity start-ups.
“The shared responsibility model employed by almost every large cloud and hosting service provider is deeply flawed. Providers only secure their parts of the software stack and the customer is obliged to make sure that their applications are used in a secure and compliant manner.
“Our platform was designed to secure assets in a fail-safe environment with all-year-round technology updates that do the heavy lifting. Each project is placed in a container, which is protected by 11 active security layers. These include swarm intelligence, multi-level firewall and risk mitigation, among others.”
Each data container is stored on three different servers, which are connected to each other in real time. To keep costs down, these servers are rented.
“The underlying infrastructure consists of hardware located in EU countries within server hubs from Ataman, OVH and GCE,” Romanów explained. “Titans24 tech stack includes Cloudflare, GitHub, Drone, CoreOS, Docker, Swarm, Elasticsearch and Prometheus.”
Plans for the future
The company has a number of ongoing commercial projects at the moment and plans to finalise another version of its client panel, which will allow the start-up to connect with a larger audience. “Our next milestone is to service more than 200 projects,” Romanów said.
Titans24 is currently on the lookout for investment, with the goal of raising $5m to $6m in the next three years. “The focus here is also on acquiring a business mentor with a network of tech contacts. We’d use the funding to expand the team, launch an internal R&D lab, run further penetration tests and to crank up marketing,” Romanów added.
“In two to three years from funding, we’d like to scale our platform to cover smart devices for intelligent houses, IoT hardware, drones, AR and VR devices and autonomous vehicle software.”
Romanów joked: “Further on, we aim to cover all the gimmicks from Blade Runner – software for artificial limbs and biomechanical components, autonomous assembly lines and chip implants.”
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