Leuven, Belgium-based Phished, a cybersecurity startup, announced on Thursday, May 2, that it has secured an additional €7.5M over the next four years through a convertible bond provided by the Flemish investment fund Welvaartsfonds.
The funding announcement comes as the company claims to be in the final stretch to achieving its first major business goal—an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of €12M.
Phished will use the bond obtained to accelerate its international growth and continue to invest significantly in cyber research.
“Our new goal is to grow Phished to an ARR of €20M by 2027. The capital injection from Welvaartsfonds will provide an extra boost and allow us to scale our sales & marketing further,” says Phished CEO Jo Vandebergh.
Phished: Predicting and preventing a cyber incident
Phished is a cybersecurity company based in Leuven founded in 2019 by Arnout Van de Meulebroucke.
The company aims to raise employee awareness about phishing emails using AI-driven simulations. Van de Meulebroucke presented the idea to his boss, Jo Vandebergh, who invested €1 million to launch the startup.
Over the past four years, Phished has grown to a team of 50 employees and has received additional financial support from Vandebergh. He has invested €8M in phases to support the company’s growth.
Phished has grown rapidly in just 48 months, offering a curriculum that enhances the cyber resilience of employees.
“Phished has developed a holistic training platform in just a few years that helps companies achieve a zero-cyber-incident rate by changing the digital behaviour of employees. Both SMEs and large renowned institutions such as Acerta, Essers, and Proximus use our platform. Now that the first major goal is within reach, we are setting the bar even higher for ourselves,” says Jo Vandebergh, CEO of Phished
In 2022, at the request of the founder Van de Meulebroucke, Vandebergh became the CEO of the company in order to expand it further.
This allowed Van de Meulebroucke to focus on the development of the platform.
As a result, Vandebergh set a business goal for the employees to achieve – an ARR of €12M within 60 months.
With 2,500 business customers and 200 MSP partners located in APAC, Europe, and North America, the company claims to achieve this objective by the end of the year.
Unlike other similar platforms, Phished focuses not only on increasing employee awareness but also on behavioural change.
Phised uses simulations and short training sessions to teach users about cyber hygiene and how to maintain their apps and devices.
Additionally, Phished provides concrete threat alerts that inform users about the latest techniques used by hackers.
Employees and teams can earn certificates through learning sessions and checkpoints, and the Behavioral Risk Score predicts the likelihood of an organisation being hacked due to human error.
The investor
The Welvaartsfonds supports promising, innovative scale-ups and growth companies facing a funding shortfall and gives them just the extra resources needed to shift up a gear or get back on track with growth.
The fund focuses on three types of financing that can strengthen the balance sheet and support growth: equity, quasi-equity, and subordinated loans.
Investment amounts can range from €1.25 to €20M, depending on the company’s needs.
“Despite advances in technology, many companies remain vulnerable to cybercrime due to a lack of awareness and training among their employees. Investing in cybersecurity is not just about strengthening systems; it is about providing employees with the knowledge and skills to recognise and block cyber threats. Thanks to Phished’s technology, companies will be able to make great progress in an era where accelerated digitalisation and the growth of cybercrime go hand in hand,” says Roald Borré, Portfolio Manager at Welvaartsfonds.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/leuven-based-phished-secures-7-5m/
