Yahoo Finance Germany's SoSafe raises $73M Series B led by Highland to address human error in cyber
As we’ve learned in the last few years, "human error"-led cybersecurity breaches are the ones companies often find hardest to guard against. Surveys suggest some 85% of attacks can be traced back to the human factor. Thus startups built to alleviate this gap — such as the U.K.’s Cybsafe, which raised $7-9 million last year — are proliferating. Addressing human behavior is clearly one of the hottest new areas for cyber.
The latest to scale up in this space is SoSafe. The Cologne-based cybersecurity awareness and testing platform has now raised a $73 million Series B funding round led by growth-capital fund Highland Europe.
Existing investors Acton Capital and Global Founders Capital were joined by SAP Hybris founder and Celonis Advisory Board member Carsten Thoma, together with La Famiglia as well as Adjust founder Christian Henschel as participants.
SoSafe competes with platforms like Knowbe4 (that went public in 2021) and Cofense, which has raised $58 million to date.
SoSafe says it takes a user-centered approach to cybersecurity, using insights from behavioral science to nudge users in the right, and safer, direction, using gamified methods to teach end-users what to look out for in a cyber attack.
It now has more than 1,500 customers, including Aldi, Ceconomy AG, Taylor Wessing, Vattenfall and Valtech.
Dr. Niklas Hellemann, co-founder and managing director of SoSafe, said: “Challenging the existing paradigms in security awareness and human risk management, we have seen tremendous adoption of our platform and extraordinary growth.”
Lead investor Highland Europe has previously backed security companies such as Malwarebytes, Cobalt and ActiveFence.
Gajan Rajanathan, partner at Highland Europe, said: “SoSafe’s founders have built a trusted cybersecurity awareness and testing platform, underpinned by behavioral analytics and human risk scoring that sustainably protects the most important threat surface in cybersecurity -- human security breaches. They have rapidly emerged as one of the leading software scale-ups, experiencing incredible momentum in a short period of time.”
Here are the founders in a more traditional setting:
SoSafe Founders
