Guardz – a cybersecurity company securing and insuring small businesses – recently announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A round led by Glilot+ (the early growth fund of Glilot Capital Partners). And Guardz’s existing investors Hanaco Ventures, iAngels, and GKFF Ventures, participated in the oversubscribed round and were joined by new investors ClearSky. This investment comes less than a year after Guardz launched with $10M in seed funding, bringing its total funding to date to $28 million.
Since emerging from stealth, Guardz achieved product-market fit, optimizing its holistic cybersecurity offering for the Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who serve small businesses. In under a year, Guardz experienced rapid growth, partnering with hundreds of MSPs and securing thousands of the businesses they manage in the US and Europe. And the new funds raised will be used to fuel the company’s commercial growth and accelerate product development to increase cybersecurity coverage, as well as to expand sales, marketing, and customer success operations globally.
Small businesses – which are the backbone of the US economy – are increasingly targeted by cybersecurity attacks. Recent years have seen them fall victim to 43% of data breaches with nearly $7 billion in reported losses, but only 14% of small businesses are prepared to defend themselves. And with most cybersecurity solutions too cumbersome for small companies to deploy, too complicated for them to understand and maintain, and too costly, small businesses regularly turn to their MSPs to handle their cybersecurity needs. So MSPs face challenges in managing multiple companies’ cybersecurity setups across a multitude of disparate platforms, sourcing attractive cyber insurance coverage for their customers, and successfully outshining competitors for new clients.
The Guardz cybersecurity platform enables MSPs to seamlessly manage their numerous small business customers’ cyber posture, subscription plans, and remediation from a single, multi-tenant platform with a simple and cost-effective approach. And the holistic solution provides automated threat detection and remediation across all attack vectors, including business data, employee identities, cloud directories, web browsing, emails, and devices, with real-time risk prevention and actionable alerts.
The AI-powered solution monitors a company’s external and internal digital footprint to continuously analyze cybersecurity risks and remediate threats. And Guardz’s comprehensive cybersecurity protection enables MSPs to offer their clients cyber insurance – which was previously inaccessible due to a lack of cybersecurity controls, generating an additional MSP revenue stream and further protecting their customers’ business interests.
KEY QUOTES:
“MSPs are at the forefront of protecting small businesses, which underpin the US economy, and we are on a mission to empower them to do so better and more efficiently. We are proud to enable our MSP partners to ensure not only small businesses’ cybersecurity posture, but also the longevity of their businesses. The time is now to double down on our successful go-to-market machine and equip even more MSPs to do so.”
— Dor Eisner, CEO and Co-Founder of Guardz
“When we met the exceptional team at Guardz, which combines cybersecurity leaders with small business go-to-market experts, it became evident that they had built the ultimate solution for small business cybersecurity – a longstanding and rapidly growing market need we’ve been monitoring at Glilot for a while. Guardz has developed an impressive, holistic, and user-friendly cybersecurity and cyber insurance risk-assessment platform that is cleverly tailored to MSPs, who serve the often-overlooked long-tail small business market. We are excited to lead this funding round and join the Guardz team on their journey to secure the digital world for those who today need it most.”
— Lior Litwak, Managing Partner and Head of Glilot+
“Guardz continues to demonstrate top-decile growth, in exceptionally challenging market environments. The trend for MSPs’ customers being drawn to securing and insuring their businesses in a holistic, hassle-free manner is a significant tailwind. We’re exceptionally proud to continue to support Dor and Alon as we have done from the very beginning of their journey.”
— Alon Lifshitz, Founding Partner at Hanaco Ventures
“The speed at which Guardz has brought a product to market, and then instantly created adoption and usage is profound. It is rare to see a company multiply sales quarter-over-quarter at this stage, and it speaks volumes to Dor and Alon’s vision and execution.”
— Shelly Hod Moyal, iAngels Founding Partner
