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Image credits: Saporo

Saporo, a Swiss cybersecurity company, announced today that it has secured $2.7M (approx €2.4M) funding in a pre-seed round co-led by Session VC and Lightbird Ventures. 

The funding will enable the Lausanne-based company to expand the team to 12 people, with key hires in data science, security research, and engineering development. 

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Part of the funding will be deployed towards product development, growing the customer base, and exploring new markets. 

“Saporo does the heavy lifting so any business can rapidly improve its security,” says Olivier Eyries, Co-Founder and CEO of Saporo. 

He adds, “At the moment, defenders are losing the race against cyber attackers. Current methods for testing weaknesses in infrastructure are slow, labour-intensive, and take up too many resources. That’s where Saporo comes in.”

What does Saporo solve?

According to Saporo, privileged account access represents the keys to the kingdom for threat actors, enabling them to move around a network almost unabated. It allows attackers to explore and extract sensitive data, encrypt it and hold the organisation at ransom. 

Saporo: What you need to know

Founded by two brothers Olivier Eyries, Guillaume Eyries, and Éric Blavier in 2021, Saporo helps organisations increase their cyber-resistance by prioritising and reducing user access risk.

The company does this by stress-testing the user and system access risks using AI and graph theory to analyse configuration and user access data. 

Consequently, the Swiss company gives scores to organisations’ resistance to attacks and finds the most impactful changes to increase cyber resistance. This allows organisations to identify and prioritise paths that attackers could take in various attacks like ransomware, say the company. 

At present, Saporo is already working with healthcare, banking, and insurance businesses. Additionally, the company Saporo can also help organisations safely move to the cloud and currently supports Microsoft AD and Azure. 

The company is planning to integrate AWS, GCP, Okta, and IaaS by the end of this year.

Investors

Swiss-based Lightbird is an early-stage VC firm focused on investing in companies that use technology to solve real problems for real people and real businesses. 

The invests in European companies active in Fintech/Insurtech, Proptech, Cybersecurity & Data Analytics as well as B2B SaaS.

Benjamin Solenthaler, the Managing Partner at Lightbird, adds, “We’re already seeing a considerable impact being made on the businesses using Saporo’s solution – with some customers seeing an 80 per cent improvement in one single day! With Saporo, all organisations can get ahead of any future cyber problem and be better equipped against attacks. We’re excited to back the team and see the company grow in 2022 and beyond.”

Founded in 2020, Session VC backs early-stage companies in the Software and Consumer space. The company provides entrepreneurs with access to expertise and insights across the entire spectrum of company building.

Martin Altorfer, Founding Partner of Session VC, concludes, “Today, for most organisations, too many issues seem to make the shortlist of priorities. However, strengthening the defence 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 prioritising the risk. This is an incredibly powerful solution and one we believe will make a profound change in assessing risks.”