Venture capital manager plans to invest $7 million in cybersec startups

Mindset Ventures, an international venture capital manager, with expertise in investing startups with disruptive technologies, plans to invest between $ 5 million and $ 7 million in cybersecurity startups by the end of next year. For this, the company is looking for startups located in the USA or Israel, with potential, preferably, for future expansion to the Brazilian market.

The focus in Brazil is due to the company’s assessment that, with the entry into force of the General Law on Protection of Personal Data (LGPD), the country’s cybersecurity sector will be among the most promising for investments, as well as in the creation from startups, such as Israel’s 1touch, which offers technology to track sensitive information in companies’ databases. Driven by the arrival of the law and, also, by the notoriety of the subject, the startup is already preparing to expand its operations in Brazil.

Mindset Ventures CIO Daniel Ibri says the LGPD has spawned a movement in which organizations have started looking for solutions to protect both their own internal information and that of their customers, which has intensified over the past few months as a result of remote work .

The executive cites a PwC study that points out that the proportion of companies that should increase investment in cyber protection in 2021 reached 57% around the world. “We have identified not only a large number of reports on companies’ increased vulnerability, but also several startups developing security solutions”, says Ibri.

In 2017, Mindset Ventures invested in SAM, an Israeli company focused on protecting home environments. The startup offers home protection through the router, protecting all devices connected to it from cyber attacks. The manager has been continuously investing in companies related to cybersecurity, whose solutions range from the protection of pen-drives, mice and other devices, to the complete recovery of directories. Despite offering different applications, they all have a common difference: the use of artificial intelligence to combat threats, a practice that is expected to grow by more than US $ 38 billion by 2026.

According to data from the organization Distrito, which brings together innovation and technology companies in its portfolio, startups in the Brazilian market raised US $ 3.5 billion in 2020, higher than the US $ 2.97 billion of the previous year. Thus, according to Ibri, with the growing importance of technology in our lives, 2021 could lead to a record of venture capital investments.

Cybersecurity startups to keep an eye on

1touch: the American startup manages to track sensitive information in the companies’ databases and identifies the locations where they are saved, preventing the company from losing control of the information and decreasing the chances of leakage. A direct application for the LGPD.

D-ID: founded in Tel-Aviv, Israel, the startup developed a technology that alters the data of photos and videos, making the files unrecognizable by automatic facial recognition systems, without the photo or video undergoing visual changes.

Eclypsium: the American startup controls and protects on a large scale the firmwares, which are the dozens of hardware software embedded in each computer. Given the amount of firmware available on each device, they generally remain unprotected and outdated even within corporate environments. Many of the major attacks recently carried out are done via firmware. Eclypsium is the only or one of the only companies that have such a solution.

Semperis: allows information saved in a company’s directories to be recovered in record time in the event of a system crash, whether due to physical damage or cyber attacks. Nowadays, professionals usually retrieve information through the company’s Active Directory, which links all of the company’s directories. Recovery by this means is usually slow, laborious and can take days to be made, until the company “goes back on air”. Through Semperis, recovery via Active Directory is done in an extremely simplified way, taking a fraction of the time it would take on traditional roads.

SAM: protects customers’ homes through the router. That is, instead of providing an antivirus to be installed on each computer, it provides software that is installed on the user’s router and that protects all devices connected to it from cyber attacks. Sepio: it protects computers against components that until then few people know can be a means of cyber attacks, such as flash drives, printers, mice and other devices connected to computers.