Lausanne, Switzerland, 06. December 2022 – Saporo announced a €4M seed round led by XAnge with participation from previous investors Session VC and Lightbird Ventures. The new round shortly follows the pre-seed investment of €2.6M in January, when the Swiss company saw a surge of customer requests from businesses that want to incorporate anticipative security measures. Saporo’s unique approach using graph theory helps companies build and maintain secure systems by design.

Saporo was founded by the two brothers Olivier and Guillaume Eyries and cybersecurity professor Éric Blavier, Ph.D. Their product enables organizations to model, measure, and increase their resistance to cyberattacks.

After a successful product launch in January 2022, Saporo saw its customer base triple. The start-up now serves companies with teams between 500 and 30,000 employees in healthcare, banking, and insurance. An analysis of multiple customers using their product has shown an attack surface reduction of up to 80 percent within three months.

To achieve these results, the product stress-tests user and system access risks. It uses graph theory and artificial intelligence analysis to test an organization's attack surface and the relationships between assets, users, and computers against millions of possible attack paths. It then measures how much effort hackers would require to compromise critical resources in a deterministic way. 

Cyberattacks and damages are increasing

Cyberattacks, and the costs for businesses, have been increasing sharply for many years:

• Global attacks increased by 28% in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. The average weekly attacks per organization worldwide reached over 1,130. (Check Point)
• Gartner Predicts 30% of Critical Infrastructure Organizations Will Experience a Security Breach by 2025 (Gartner)
• The average data breach cost was 4.1M EUR in 2021, the highest average on record. (IBM)
• 95 percent of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error. (WEF)
• In 2022, it took an average of about nine months to identify and contain a breach. Companies can save 1.07M EUR if they can contain a data breach in 200 days or less – or even prevent them from happening. (IBM)
• In 2022, there is a gap of 4 million people between the demand for cyber security talents and the available talents (HDI).

A powerful and simple universal prevention system

Saporo built a product for security practitioners, IT administrators, and business application owners. “Security cannot remain a security expert problem only. We need to empower teams who build and make changes daily to consider the security impact of their decision and help them secure systems by design,” says Olivier Eyries, co-founder and CEO. 

Christophe Bouillard, CISO at Mirabaud Bank describes the current state of cyber security software for companies: “We have enough Christmas trees already with bells and whistles that go off when an attack is successful. What would make my life a lot easier is a simple to-do list with specific steps to increase our resistance to attacks.”

Now that the system can significantly reduce the risk and damage of successful cyberattacks, Saporo will use the newly raised funding to grow its team, expand the product and bring it to more countries and markets across Europe.

Nicolas Rose, Managing Partner at XAnge: “We believe that preventive cybersecurity measures will become the new normal for companies around the globe. We are excited to back the Saporo team and their strong conviction that IT security can be greatly improved by being prepared using advanced software that mimics attacks.  Their combination of Artificial Intelligence with a simplified user experience will be the foundation for the teams’ next chapter: helping hundreds of companies protect their business from an ever-increasing flood of cyberattacks.”

Benjamin Solenthaler, Managing Partner at Lightbird: “We’re already seeing a considerable impact being made on the businesses using Saporo’s solution - with some customers seeing an 80 percent reduction of their internal attack surface in one single day! With Saporo, all organizations can get ahead of any future cyber problem and be better equipped against attacks. We’re excited to even further back the team and see the company grow in 2023 and beyond.”

Martin Altorfer, Founding Partner of Session VC: “Today, too many issues seem to make the shortlist of priorities for most organizations. However, strengthening the defense is imperative, especially when situations and technology change daily. Saporo takes the hardest part of the job away, giving customers the data and recommendations to act now by prioritizing the risk. We believe this incredibly powerful solution will make a profound change in assessing risks.”