IriusRisk, a cybersecurity startup levelling up security and threat modelling, has just scored €29 million to expand its global reach. The Spanish startup is empowering clients across key industries to have security built-in from the very beginning.
Threat modelling, the process of identifying security threats during tech development, has traditionally been a labour-intensive and manual process. Surprisingly, it’s a task characterised by the humble excel spreadsheet and whiteboard, using devs’ technological brainpower to access security issues before they arise. It’s therefore expensive and time-consuming, and, is at risk itself of human error.
Aiming to automate the process, save time and money and enable security to be built-in from the very beginning, Spanish startup IriusRisk was born in 2015. The team has just picked up new capital investment to help expand the product further.
Funding details
The €29 million Series A raise was led by cyber and deep tech investor Paladin Capital Group, with participation from existing investors SwanLaab Venture Factory, Bright Pixel Capital, 360 Capital and Inveready.
It comes after a busy year for the innovators who doubled their customer base in 2021 after gaining high adoption among major financial services institutions, with six of the Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) now using the IriusRisk Threat Modeling Platform.
The company also more than quadrupled its partner base through 2021, as systems integrators increasingly see threat modelling as an essential step in digital transformation programs.
Threat modelling platform
IriusRisk is on a mission to empower security and development teams to ensure applications have security built-in from the start.
The platform helps developers, architects and security engineers to design secure software throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) – introducing security from initial design and tracking its implementation through integrations in the development toolchain. IriusRisk’s platform meets the pressing need for software developers to ‘shift left’ when it comes to security to reduce design flaws and the associated costs.
Whether teams are implementing threat modelling from scratch, or scaling up their existing operations, the IriusRisk approach results in improved speed-to-market, collaboration across security and development teams, and the avoidance of costly security flaws.
Co-founder and CEO Stephen De Vries said: “Industries such as financial services, healthcare, the public sector and many more are already performing threat modelling and now need to do it at scale. Increasing awareness and standards such as those from the NIST, OWASP Top Ten and IEC/ANSI require threat modelling as a fundamental step in building secure code. This helps to raise the profile of threat modelling overall in the industry. We have reached a tipping point, where those that fail to recognise the benefits of the technology, risk being left behind. We are delighted that our investors have seen this momentum shift and are backing us to continue to lead the threat modelling industry.”
The Spanish scaleup also has a free-to-use Community Edition, which in the past year grew users by 120% with over 4000 projects running.
Now, moving forward, this new investment will enable the team to ramp up its global expansion. The US team grew more than 200% last year, so clearly there is high demand and market space n that side of the Atlantic.
IriusRisk also plans to grow the community platform, make key strategic hires and double down on the research and development of its industry-leading technology.
Kenneth Pentimonti, Principal at Paladin Capital: “IriusRisk’s Threat Modeling Platform is clearly making a decisive impact on product design in numerous industries. We’ve seen the move towards a wide range of verticals employing threat modelling as an essential tenet of their design process and we fundamentally believe there is huge room for growth in this sector – so much so that we have decided to lead this new round. IriusRisk has already built an impressive base of marquee customers and I fully expect this adoption to be supercharged in the coming years.”
