September, 25 2024 € 6 million investment in Enginsight strengthens its mission to protect SMEs against cyber attacks

Engin­sight, an expe­ri­enced Ger­man provider of an all-in-one cyber­se­cu­rity plat­form for SMEs, has suc­cess­fully closed a new financ­ing round led by UVC Part­ners. Among the co-investors are Carsten Maschmeyer with his fund seed+speed as well as bm‑t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen GmbH, Bran­den­burg VENTURES GmbH, Smart Infra­struc­ture Ven­tures and Talanx AG. With the fresh cap­i­tal of €6 mil­lion, the com­pany intends to pur­sue its mis­sion of pro­tect­ing Ger­man SMEs from the grow­ing threat of cyber attacks. 

Small and medium-sized enter­prises (SMEs), which make up 99.4 per­cent of the Ger­man econ­omy, are par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble to cyber­at­tacks as they often lack the nec­es­sary resources and exper­tise to pro­tect them­selves against increas­ingly com­plex threats. Accord­ing to the annual report on the state of IT secu­rity in Ger­many pub­lished by the Fed­eral Office for Infor­ma­tion Secu­rity (BSI), cyber­at­tacks caused dam­age amount­ing to 203 bil­lion euros in 2022 alone. No won­der that a wide vari­ety of sit­u­a­tion reports call for more com­mit­ment to cyber secu­rity — both from politi­cians and orga­ni­za­tions. Engin­sight tar­gets its solu­tions pre­cisely at those who are most affected by the threat. With its inno­v­a­tive plat­form, the com­pany aims to pro­tect SMEs from the eco­nomic dam­age caused by such attacks. SMEs of all sizes and indus­tries — from the tax con­sul­tant around the cor­ner to com­pa­nies with 10,000 employ­ees — can ben­e­fit from the offer­ing. “Our aim is to relieve the bur­den on IT man­agers in SMEs and give them the nec­es­sary trans­parency and con­trol over their net­works,” explains Mario Jan­deck, co-founder and CEO of Engin­sight. “Around 21,000 IT sys­tems are suc­cess­fully attacked every day — a huge threat con­sid­er­ing how sen­si­tive and impor­tant com­pany data is. With our holis­tic approach, which is based on attack detec­tion and defense as well as auto­mated response to attacks, com­pa­nies can act proac­tively and pro­tect themselves.”

Urgent need for action on security gaps in SMEs

Despite the grow­ing threat sit­u­a­tion, too few SMEs have stepped up their secu­rity mea­sures. Empir­i­cal sur­veys by the con­sult­ing firm Deloitte showed that it took up to seven days for 53% of respon­dents to detect a cyber­at­tack. The lack of speed of response is no less seri­ous than the fact that only 62% of micro-enter­prises have reg­u­larly installed secu­rity updates and just 18% have an emer­gency plan at all. “These gen­er­ally known deficits increase the dan­ger, as cyber crim­i­nals are increas­ingly tar­get­ing SMEs. With our auto­mated end-to-end solu­tion, we are declar­ing war on the attack­ers and enabling SMEs to com­pre­hen­sively restruc­ture their IT land­scape and pre­pare for the future,” explains Max Taran­tik, COO of Enginsight.

Cybersecurity “Made in Germany” for SMEs

Engin­sight relies on a solu­tion devel­oped 100% in Ger­many that is specif­i­cally tai­lored to the needs of Ger­man SMEs. Andreas Unseld, Gen­eral Part­ner at UVC Part­ner: “From our per­spec­tive, the lack of holis­tic solu­tions that are afford­able and quick to imple­ment is the biggest hur­dle for many SMEs. Enginsight’s cus­tomers ben­e­fit from a pre-con­fig­ured plat­form that is usu­ally imple­mented and oper­a­tional within a day. The com­pany com­bines attack detec­tion, mon­i­tor­ing and response in a sin­gle sys­tem — with­out the use of mul­ti­ple iso­lated tools. This is pre­cisely why we believe that Enginsight’s offer­ing is in tune with the times.” “The avail­abil­ity of IT secu­rity spe­cial­ists in par­tic­u­lar is a per­pet­ual bot­tle­neck for SMEs. Engin­sight closes this gap, as the solu­tions can be oper­ated by spe­cial­ists with­out any major addi­tional time expen­di­ture. For this rea­son, Engin­sight is par­tic­u­larly valu­able to IT ser­vices com­pa­nies work­ing with SMB clients,” said Jakob Ban­hardt, Invest­ment Man­ager at UVC Part­ners. “We are proud of how Engin­sight has expanded and improved its prod­uct port­fo­lio in recent years. It is not only large com­pa­nies that are increas­ingly at the cen­ter of cyber attacks; SMEs and smaller com­pa­nies are also being forced to seri­ously pro­tect their soft­ware and hard­ware sys­tems. Engin­sight pro­vides busi­ness and admin­is­tra­tion with an all-in-one secu­rity plat­form plus sup­port and con­sult­ing that offers all-round pro­tec­tion made in Ger­many,” adds Alexan­der Kölpin, Investor and Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at seed + speed Ventures.

Future strategy: growth and expansion

With the new financ­ing round, Engin­sight plans to expand its mar­ket lead­er­ship in the DACH region and also estab­lish itself inter­na­tion­ally. The focus is on tar­geted brand­ing cam­paigns, the expan­sion of sales and the devel­op­ment of new part­ner­ships. At the same time, the soft­ware will be fur­ther devel­oped in order to con­tin­u­ously opti­mize pro­tec­tion for SMEs and keep it fit for the future.

About UVC Partners 

UVC Part­ners is a lead­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal firm invest­ing in Euro­pean B2B tech star­tups with offices in Munich and Berlin. With more than 600 mil­lion euros in assets under man­age­ment, UVC Part­ners typ­i­cally invests between 1 and 10 mil­lion euros ini­tially and up to 30 mil­lion euros per startup in the areas of DeepTech, Cli­mateTech, Mobil­ity and Software/AI. As an inde­pen­dent part­ner of Unternehmer­TUM, Europe’s lead­ing startup ecosys­tem, UVC Part­ners has unique access to pro­pri­etary deal flow, more than 1,000 com­pa­nies and SMEs as well as tal­ent from the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity of Munich, one of the best tech­ni­cal uni­ver­si­ties in Europe. UVC Part­ners’ invest­ments include Flix, Isar Aero­space, planqc, Prox­ima Fusion, Reve­rion, Tacto, TWAICE, Deep­Drive, STABL and many more. All port­fo­lio com­pa­nies and founders ben­e­fit from the team’s exten­sive invest­ment and exit expe­ri­ence, abil­ity to build sus­tain­able indus­try lead­ers and UnternehmerTUM’s net­work, espe­cially to accel­er­ate mar­ket entry.

About bm|t

Erfurt-based bm‑t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment Thürin­gen (bm|t) — a sub­sidiary of Thüringer Auf­baubank — is the first address for ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ments in Thuringia, Ger­many. The bm|t cur­rently man­ages twelve funds with a total vol­ume of EUR 445 mil­lion and invests in inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies with strong growth poten­tial across all sec­tors and all phases of the cor­po­rate life cycle. bm|t joined Engin­sight GmbH as an early-stage investor shortly after it was founded in 2017 and has since accom­pa­nied the com­pany in its growth strat­egy and sup­ported it with investments.

About Enginsight

Engin­sight offers the per­fect cyber­se­cu­rity solu­tion for SMEs. Founded in Jena in 2017, the soft­ware, which was devel­oped entirely in-house, is now used by numer­ous SMEs and is par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar with IT ser­vice providers. They use Engin­sight to deter­mine the sta­tus of their cus­tomers’ IT secu­rity and take proac­tive action, detect­ing and block­ing attacks. Fol­low­ing the approach of “mak­ing the invis­i­ble vis­i­ble” and “mak­ing the inse­cure secure”, Engin­sight focuses on trans­parency and automa­tion when it comes to IT secu­rity. The “human fac­tor in IT secu­rity”, which is at the fore­front of many cyber attacks, is to be elim­i­nated. With Secu­rity 100 % Made in Ger­many, Engin­sight is pur­su­ing the vision of mak­ing SMEs secure effec­tively and sus­tain­ably with its tech­no­log­i­cally lead­ing solution.

Press contact:

Patri­cia Brumme
Head of Mar­ket­ing PR
patricia.brumme@enginsight.com
Phone: +49 151 74254982