Business

New success for Cluj – and crowdfunding – as Cyscale raises 350,000 euros in just four hours

Romanian cloud security start-up Cyscale has raised 350,000 euros in just four hours via the SeedBlink platform, exceeding its original funding goal by 50,000 euros. The financing is another success story for both SeedBlink and for Cluj, the Transylvanian city that is rapidly confirming its status as a major start-up and IT hub.

SeedBlink is now the largest crowdfunding platform in Central and Eastern Europe, aimed at making investing into start-ups easy, both for the start-ups and for potential investors. In its own most recent investment round, the Cluj-based firm raised 200,000 euros from StartupBlink investors and a further 100,000 euros from the GapMinder venture capital fund.

GapMinder also invested 100,000 euros in the crowdfunding platform last year.

“We are glad that we can intensify support for innovative start-ups, now reaching Cluj. The founders of Cyscale are very ambitious and they have global scaling plans for the solution they have developed to a most concerning problem,” says Andrei Dudoiu, co-founder and CEO of SeedBlink.

Cyscale itself will use the new money over the next 12 months to develop its technical, marketing, and sales team and to aim for global expansion — mainly to the United States, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK.

Currently, the company has over fifty B2B clients, most of them in the IT field, and is gunning for a 1,000 clients by 2025.

“The clients we have are currently only from Romania, but recently, we have signed partnerships with large companies to expand on the US market. In Europe, we want to attract customers especially from England, Germany and the Netherlands because these are the countries with a high level of adoption of cloud technology and a very large number of companies,” says Manuela Țicudean, co-founder and project manager at Cyscale.

Cyscale was founded in 2018 by Țicudean, Ovidiu Cical, Laura Cical and Andrei Milaș, and offers data protection software for content stored in various cloud services. The start-up also performs risk analyses of the data. This way, with their data protected and processes digitalised, companies can become more competitive.

The company boasts “next generation” security, compliance, and governance tools which they claim continually identify vulnerabilities, avoid data loss, and protect cloud environments with automatic remediation.

Cyscale’s solution works on multiple platforms at the same time. Users can connect the service to major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud. What’s more, when a company chooses Cyscale as their security solution, it can visualise and protect their data in multiple clouds through one single dashboard. The company’s data protection solution also helps with regulation compliance such as GDPR in the EU.

The time is right for a cloud security company like Cyscale, according to Cristian Dascălu, co-founder of Techcelerator and partner of GapMinder VC, even though many Eastern European companies are still reluctant to move their data online.

“A study from 2019 conducted by the research company Gartner informed us that in 2025 half of the planet’s data volume will be stored in the cloud. The same study stated that in 2025 about 99 per cent of cloud security issues will appear because of the fault of customers. Yes, there is a danger of data loss if the migration to the cloud is not done with the help of security specialists,” he explains.

According to the Cyscale team, the company’s current value is around two million euros, but with its latest investment it will rise to 2.3 million euros. They expect that their company will reach a 30 million-euro valuation by 2023.

“This very large increase of Cyscale’s value is based on the increase in revenue that will come with the expansion abroad […] We want to become one of the largest cloud security companies, and this global expansion will help us exceed a value of 30 million euros in three years,” explains co-founder Ovidiu Cical.

As for Cluj, which has a population of around 300,000, in August it became the first in emerging Europe to make it into the final stage of the European Capital of Innovation Award, along with 11 other cities from across the continent. The European Commission will announce the winner at the European Research and Innovation Days later this month.

It is estimated that around 10 per cent of the city’s workforce are employed in IT and at start-ups. Big names to have emerged from the city include LiveRail, a video advertising platform, which was acquired by Facebook for a reported 400-500 million US dollars in 2014, and Skobbler, the map and navigation app-maker that was acquired by Telenav for about 24 million US dollars.

The city is also a leader in Romania when it comes to urban technology. Earlier this month Cluj unveiled a scheme that allows drivers to find free car parking spaces in the city centre using sensors are connected to a smartphone app.

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