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How many times have you panicked over almost falling for an online scam or cyber attack? Opening an email sent from “your company’s CEO” requesting your urgent assistance, or clicking the wrong link when on your company laptop?
Easy mistakes to make, but incredibly costly – a nightmare for you and for the company’s security operations team. Like it or not, cyber threats are here to stay. But everyone deserves to feel safe online, and this is what CyberSmart, a leading UK-based SME cyber security risk management and transfer platform, is looking to solve.
The opportunity to change the security game
As alluded to above, cyber threats to SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) are by no means a new phenomenon, and the fact that small businesses have historically been woefully underserved by cyber security providers is well-documented. The rapid acceleration in digital transformation and push to remote working driven by the pandemic has only served to exacerbate this issue. When you contrast that 61% of SMEs were targeted by a cyber attack in 2021 with the fact that only 14% of small businesses consider their cyber attack and risk mitigation ability to be effective, there is a clear market opportunity.
At Oxx, we have spent the last few years looking for a business with the potential to address this opportunity and become a category defining leader in SME cyber security – and we have found it in CyberSmart.
Reaching SMEs in a scalable and efficient way across the UK and Europe
One of the greatest challenges faced by companies in this space is figuring out how to reach SMEs in a scalable and capital efficient way – CyberSmart has nailed this. Driven by an increasing awareness of cyber threats, SMEs are turning to MSPs (Managed Service Providers) to solve their security challenges with an estimated 92% saying they would “consider using or moving to a new MSP if it offered the ‘right’ cyber security solution”. CyberSmart with their partner-focused GTM strategy and comprehensive platform is ideally positioned to continue to enable MSPs in the UK to expand their offering, become more competitive and better serve SMEs.
While cyber security threats are relatively geographically agnostic, MSP adoption in mainland Europe has historically lagged behind the UK as a means of countering them. This is changing rapidly, with European SMEs increasingly realising they don’t have the resources to effectively manage cyber risk and therefore turning to MSPs. Having successfully proven their ability to support MSPs in the UK, CyberSmart is now ready to scale this approach across the rest of Europe
Nailing the insurance aspect
Cyber insurance is another weapon in the cybersecurity arsenal and represents a huge opportunity for CyberSmart. Although SME cyber insurance adoption in Europe is still relatively low, particularly when compared to the more mature US market, it is swiftly growing. Understanding the risk profile of their customers is one of the most challenging issues faced by cyber insurers and they are usually reliant on outside-in assumptions and customer self-assessments. This can result in risk profiles that are too broad to be useful and that can quickly become obsolete.
By contrast, CyberSmart, as a cybersecurity risk management platform first and foremost, has inside-out real-time data on the security posture of their end-customers and can therefore better understand their risk profile from a cyber insurance perspective too. This security-first approach benefits both insurers and SMEs by allowing for more data-driven insurance decisions which should result in lower risk for the insurers and lower premiums for the SMEs.
An exciting future
We see great potential in CyberSmart and are excited to announce that we have led a £12.75m Series B investment into the company. We are proud to partner with Jamie Akhtar and the fantastic team he has built alongside our friends at British Patient Capital, Legal & General Capital, Solano Partners and returning investors IQ Capital, Eos Venture Partners and Winton Ventures.
The new investment will be used to expand commercial operations internationally and to continue to build out the cyber insurance offering to capitalise on these major trends and take CyberSmart to a position of true category leadership. We couldn’t be more excited to join and support CyberSmart’s journey in their next phase of growth!
Read more about the investment here.
