IQ Capital leads GBP5.5m CyberSmart funding round

Submitted By Karin Wasteson | 14/07/2020 - 5:23pm -

IQ Capital has led a GBP 5.5 million series A funding round in CyberSmart, which helps small to medium-sized businesses combat cyber-attacks.

The fresh capital will be used to fund CyberSmart’s growth, which has seen an increase in demand with a revenue increase of 300 per cent over the past 12 months, as the lockdown accelerated the use of its cloud-based technology, according to the company. 

“We are delighted to have closed our Series A funding round with GBP 5.5 million to fund our next stage of growth. Our investors have seen that we have built a great technology and also a great team,” said Jamie Akhtar, CEO of CyberSmart.

“The SMB market has not been easy to protect until now, and business owners have so many issues to deal with they often wait until it is too late, losing all their customer data or even cash in a cyber-attack,” he added.

Akhtar continued: “I set up CyberSmart after witnessing first-hand how SMBs suffer data breaches and realising that hundreds of thousands of businesses were suffering cyberattacks. When we started, 74 percent of SMBs had a breach that year. If 74 percent of buildings caught fire, there would be fire stations on every corner. The technology is now there that enables us to automate protecting SMBs by implementing a cloud-based platform that is both simple and cost effective to deploy, backed by a Cyber Essentials Certification.
 
According to Kerry Baldwin, partner at IQ Capital, CyberSmart has a strong product-market fit, and is hitting targets well ahead of schedule.

“The team has been incredible to work with over the last year and demonstrated thought leadership and deep understanding of the needs of SMBs, enabling CyberSmart to provide automated, and simple to implement protection for firms with 1-20+ employees,” she said.

Tags Cybersecurity Deals & Transactions Investments