Cybersecurity startup 4Securitas has snagged an investment deal from a French player
The two companies plan to integrate each others products.
4SECURITAS, AN IRISH cybersecurity company, has raised an investment from French firm ITrust.
The deal will see ITrust take a minority stake in the Dublin-based startup as well a partnership to integrate the two companies’ products.
4Securitas was founded in 2017 by Donal Kerr and Stefan Uygur and has raised some funding from Enterprise Ireland and angel investors, but this marks its first significant deal. The financial figures of the deal have not been disclosed.
The deal comes as Ireland strives to position itself as a hotbed of cybersecurity talent. Domestic startups are growing alongside expanding international players, such as Accenture, FireEye and Symantec, which have significant operations in Ireland.
4Securitas is developing an AI-powered platform, called ACSIA, that helps companies identify security threats in real-time.
Kerr told Fora that ITrust will integrate the ACSIA platform into ITrust’s existing products to improve threat detection in real-time and reduce the need for cleaning up breaches after the fact.
“There’s a part they are missing in terms of threat detection that we’re able to greatly improve on when they integrate it into their own platform, which would allow them to reach more customers and offer a greater level of security protection,” he said.
Development of ACSIA was spearheaded by co-founder Uygur who previously worked at Oracle and First Derivatives.
“He would be very familiar with both the attack mentality of a hacker, the modus operandi and the tools,” Kerr said.
“Putting those skill sets together, we created a piece of technology that recognises the patterns associated with the majority of hacking techniques.”
While ITrust intends to bake 4Securitas’ technology into its own products, the deal will also see the French company re-sell the ACSIA product separately to its re-seller network.
Kerr added that the Dublin startup, which has four staff currently, will begin “soft conversations” over the next year or two to secure more backers and deals.
“We’d like to enter the US market and that requires more resources than this deal would allow for us.”
Get our Daily Briefing with the morning’s most important headlines for innovative Irish businesses.
