Cyber security software company Panaseer has successfully raised $2.25 million through a syndicated seed investment round. The investors include Albion Ventures, Notion Capital, Winton Technology Ventures, C5 Holdings, and Elixirr. Panaseer was founded in 2014 by Nik Whitfield and a team of cyber security experts from BAE Systems. It is one of a new wave of UK cyber security start-ups working with commercial enterprises and was selected to accompany Prime Minister David Cameron to Washington DC earlier this year as part of a cyber-security delegation. Panaseer has since signed its first New York based Financial Services client.
According to Gartner, corporates spent $71 billion on cybersecurity in 2014 and this sum is expected to increase rapidly. In the UK, 80% of large corporates suffered a cyber breach in 2014, with an average cost of ?1m per breach.
A key trend to note is that cybercrime has latterly become highly sophisticated: advanced tools that were previously the domain of national espionage have filtered down to the criminal world, with organised gangs behind highly targeted attacks to steal cash and trade secrets from multi-national enterprises.
Panaseer uses the latest data science techniques to help major corporations answer the question, “How Secure are We?" The company has built a platform which analyses the data provided by all the different cyber security solutions and provides a visual interface to drill down into and understand this information, and so inform board-level decisions on the allocation of security budgets or weaknesses in cybersecurity policies.
As well as growing a New York client base, Panaseer is currently working with several major UK Financial Services customers.
