CyberSmart currently has 4,000 customers in the U.K., with 1,800 of them also taking the company’s insurance policies as well — the tip of the iceberg in a market with 5.5 million small and medium enterprises (SMBs) overall — but Jamie Akhtar, the co-founder and CEO, said there is a lot of interest out there and it’s about meeting that demands right now, so the plan is to use the funding to continue developing its product, to potentially make some acquisitions, and to expand its channel partners, and customers, in its home market as well as further afield in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The funding is being led by Oxx — the European VC that focuses on growth rounds for SaaS startups — with strategic and other interesting backers participating. They include British Patient Capital (the commercial subsidiary of the U.K. government’s British Business Bank), Legal & General Capital (affiliated with the insurance giant) and Solano Partners; previous backers IQ Capital, Eos Venture Partners, Winton Ventures and Seedcamp are also participating. The company had previously raised £8 million and it’s not disclosing its valuation with this round but Akhtar said it was oversubscribed.
Investor and customer interest in a company like CyberSmart speaks to a bigger shift we’ve been seeing in the market. Small and medium businesses used to be overlooked when it came to cybersecurity. That was for a combination of reasons: criminals typically focused attention on the biggest targets as the biggest prizes, SMBs are not known to be big spenders when it comes to any kind of IT, and for those reasons, the companies building the most interesting cybersecurity tech weren’t focused on them as target use cases and customers.
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