Helsinki&Oulu-based cybersecurity startup Test of Things has raised €1.2 million in a pre-seed round led by Vendep Capital, with participation from angel investors including Aapo Oksman, Zach Shelby, Neil Costigan, Ääkköset Oy, and ScanABC, alongside public support from Business Finland. The company is building an AI-powered platform that automates cybersecurity testing and compliance for connected devices—replacing slow, manual processes with continuous testing and auto-generated regulatory documentation as frameworks like the EU Cyber Resilience Act tighten requirements. The fresh capital will be used to expand the engineering team and accelerate product development, as the seven-person, pre-revenue startup pushes to help manufacturers ship secure IoT and industrial devices faster while reducing the growing compliance burden.
When a company builds a connected device — whether it’s a smart lock, a hospital monitor, or a piece of factory equipment — it has to make sure that device is secure before selling it. That sounds reasonable. The catch is how they do it today: cybersecurity testing and compliance documentation is largely manual work of highly skilled experts, thus very expensive. And it doesn’t scale when today’s market is flooded with connected products.
“Cybersecurity of products is in everyone’s interest,” says Marko Kaasila, CEO and co-founder of Test of Things. “But the current way of assuring it — manual, not systematic, and expensive — is unsustainable.”
Every insecure device that makes it to market is a potential door left unlocked for cyber criminals to exploit— hack your personal data, the operational systems of the factory, or the controls within an office building, even threatening essential critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid.
Test of Things is building a platform that automates cybersecurity compliance testing end-to-end. Instead of a team of cybersecurity experts spending weeks combing through a device’s security manually, their AI-powered software handles the heavy lifting — running tests continuously, flagging issues early, and generating the compliance documentation that regulators increasingly require.
For device manufacturers, this means getting secure products to market faster. For the rest of us, it means the things we invite into our homes and workplaces are a little less likely to be someone else’s backdoor.
Rauli Kaksonen, CTO and co-founder, puts it simply: “This investment will let us focus on building the product further and start helping manufacturers to achieve their customers’ and authorities’ trust with secure products.”
The €1.2 million round was led by Vendep Capital, with backing from a strong cast of industry veterans: Aapo Oksman, Zach Shelby, Neil Costigan, and ScanABC. Business Finland innovation funding rounds out the total.
Sami Ahvenniemi, Partner at Vendep Capital, explains why they moved fast: “The market for IoT and OT security and compliance testing is entering a high-growth phase driven by two converging megatrends: firstly, the increasing integration of industrial control systems, IIoT and OT networks into enterprise IT and cloud ecosystems; and secondly, the rising regulatory and operational risk environment around critical infrastructure, manufacturing, energy and utilities. When two successful entrepreneurs with 100% relevant experience put their heads together to build a testing platform, we wanted to jump in right from the start!”
The fresh capital will go toward growing the engineering team and accelerating the platform development— so that the next generation of connected devices can be shipped with a little bit more peace of mind.
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Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/test-of-things-raises-e1-2m-pre-seed/
