Romanian startup Cyscale, €3million seed round for international growth

The round was led by Notion Capital, with participation from Seedcamp (investor also in UiPath), GapMinder BV, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen - previously founder of Wercker and now Fiberplane and NP-Hard Ventures and David Mytton - founder of Console.dev and Server Density.

Cyscale is a startup that develops software solutions to protect data stored in the cloud and performs risk data analysis. The company was founded in 2019 in Cluj by Manuela Țicudean, Ovidiu Cical and Andrei Milaș.

The third investment round and the third financing from GapMinder BV

This has been Cyscale's third investment round in three years since its launch. The startup started its acceleration process with Techcelerator, attracting support and successive financing rounds: 100,000 euros in 2019 from GapMinder BV and 350,000 euros through SeedBlink in 2021 (GapMinder BV being the lead investor). In fact, among Techcelerator alumni, Cyscale is the startup with the most significant validation brought in less than three years by international investors to an accelerated startup.

"Through this funding, we want to increase our team in Romania and the UK next year. We have open jobs in both countries. By the end of this year, we want to exceed 25 people in the engineering area and recruit ten more people for other positions. We are still focused on developing Cyscale's cybersecurity platform, but we understand that the team needs to grow in operational and commercial areas. We want to be present globally in the next three years and the team to exceed 250 people by then", says Ovidiu Cical, CEO and co-founder of Cyscale.

Users and partner companies in the UK, Singapore, Germany, France and the USA

The startup currently has 15 employees and users&partner companies from Romania, the UK, Singapore, Germany, France and the USA.

"Our goal is to be present globally, not just in certain markets. But to achieve this goal, we know that we have to invest a lot in creating a self-served and self-serviced product, that is, to make the customer experience  «a state of the art». We are also looking for new colleagues to help us in this segment. The most difficult thing is to access specialized human resources in departments other than the technical ones, such as marketing experts, SaaS cybersecurity sales, channel managers, analysts and security researchers", adds Ovidiu Cical.

The company is currently recruiting sales&marketing experts and managers in the UK and Go and ReactJS programmers.

Most of Cyscale's clients are fintech companies that use technologies that are operated from the cloud. The founders estimate an accelerated development in 2022 and 2023 and target to have more than 100 companies as customers in the next two years.

Notion Capital and Seedcamp - among investors

Manuela Ticudean, co-founder of Cyscale: “The cybersecurity industry needs to shift toward understanding cyber risk in context. Only then will we be able to fight the increasingly sophisticated and advanced threats targeting our organizations and our lives.”

Kamil Mieczakowski, principal at Notion Capital: “Over the past five years, we’ve witnessed a paradigm shift in how enterprises run their server infrastructures. But the cybersecurity industry hasn’t kept up. We’re really excited to be partnering with Manuela, Ovidiu, and the Cyscale team as they develop what we see as the most compelling cloud visibility and control platform for the modern enterprise.”

Carlos Eduardo Espinal, managing partner at Seedcamp: “The experience of Cyscale’s founders speaks for itself. Both Manuela and Ovidiu are highly skilled and highly valued members of the cybersecurity community. Their belief in the importance of context in cybersecurity analysis is a vital step in ensuring the effective and precise protection of an organization’s cloud infrastructure.”

Dan Mihăescu, Founding Partner GapMinder BV: "We are witnessing a tenfold increase in Cyscale and we are happy to follow on and invest further into Cyscale. It is an important phase in the company's development, doing a lot of international steps, maturing the platform, and preparing for further scaling up outside Europe, to the US and Asia. From the early beginnings - when we saw the founders in the Techcelerator program in 2019 - we believed in the founders and we continued to support their further growth to achieve their vision of becoming a leader in cloud cybersecurity.”