Saluti Cyber Guru: announcing our first investment in Italy

We’re delighted to announce our first investment in Italy as we partner with P101 to invest in the €3.6m Serie A fundraising round of Cyber Guru, a Rome-based cybersecurity training and awareness software startup tackling cybercrime by focusing on the human factor.

We are excited to back founder and CEO Gianni Baroni and the whole Cyber Guru team on their mission to strengthen the defence against social engineering attacks.

The Problem: employees are the most vulnerable line of defence, and the most attacked

Despite increasing levels of technological sophistication, employees continue to practice unsafe behaviours that have made the human factor the principal attack vector by which cybercriminals attack organisations.

Employees are the most vulnerable line of defence as well as the most attacked. And the attacks are increasing in volume, frequency and cost to remediate.

Cybersecurity experts predict that in 2021, there will be a cyberattack incident every 11 seconds. This is nearly twice as much as in 2019 (every 19 seconds), and four times the rate five years ago (every 40 seconds in 2016).

It is expected that cybercrime will cost the global economy $6.1 trillion annually, making it the third-largest economy in the world, right behind those of the United States and China. Most importantly, 88% of data breaches are caused by human error, on average costing $3.9m to remediate each breach and 280 days to resolve.

The Solution: Cyber Guru strengthens the human factor

Using innovative experiental educational methods, Cyber Guru’s training and awareness platform can effectively strengthen the human factor, converting it from the weak link in the defensive chain into the first line of protection against Cyber Crime. The platform comprises three elements:

• Cyber Guru Awareness: an integrated and dynamic e-learning platform
• Cyber Guru Phishing: a gamified experiential learning solution
• Cyber Guru Channel: a highly engaging storytelling unit focused on awareness

This engaging and gamified solution is designed to increase the resistance in three specific areas: risk perception, readiness in responding to attacks, and threat awareness. Modern techniques of automation and artificial intelligence make the platform completely autonomous: the solution creates training programs and implements adaptive simulation campaigns in full independence.

Adara Ventures view: A truly universal opportunity

The enterprise cybersecurity stack has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, as CISOs respond to an ever more complex set of threats. However, for all the investment and innovation, the simplest form of attack (email phishing) continues to be the most dangerous and prolific. An employee clicking malicious content is a truly universal problem.

Cyber Guru is bootstrapped to date and has grown 600% in the last 12 months, adding more than 30 leading corporations and public administrations as customers. The team have demonstrated strong product-market fit in an every enterprise market opportunity. We’re excited to partner with them and aid their international expansion.