French startup Riot has successfully secured $30 million in Series B funding, following its achievement of $10 million in annual revenues in 2024. Initially aimed at educating staff about cybersecurity threats, the company is now seeking to take a more proactive approach by encouraging employees to reduce their exposure to potential attacks.
Leading the funding round on Monday is Left Lane Capital, with contributions from returning investors including Y Combinator, Base10, and FundersClub. According to insights from TechCrunch, Riot has achieved a post-investment valuation exceeding $170 million after this Series B financing.
Riot began its journey by implementing simulated phishing attacks, sending employees deceptive emails that mimic legitimate ones, designed to trick them into clicking links and divulging personal data.
Through this tactic, employees become more cautious about unsolicited emails. Over time, Riot has expanded its offerings with educational resources and a friendly security chatbot named Albert, accessible via Slack and Microsoft Teams.
This approach has proven successful, allowing Riot to engage with 1 million employees across 1,500 organizations, including notable clients like L’Occitane, Deel, Intercom, and Le Monde. Remarkably, just a couple of years prior, the company served only 100,000 employees.
However, incidents of cyberattacks continue to escalate, with significant ramifications. A recent case is the Change Healthcare data breach, impacting 190 million Americans, initiated by compromised credentials tied to personal accounts. An employee had reused their password across personal and corporate platforms, and there was a lack of multifactor authentication on Citrix as well.
This context fuels Riot’s ambition to evolve from merely educating employees. “Our focus is to assess employees’ security practices. Are they enabling multifactor authentication? Do they have secure codes on their smartphones? Are their LinkedIn privacy settings restrictive enough? There are numerous measures employees can implement to complicate matters for hackers,” explained Riot’s founder and CEO, Benjamin Netter, to TechCrunch.
Riot’s forthcoming product is termed an Employee Security Posture Management platform, envisioned as a centralized dashboard for monitoring security at the employee level. While various Posture Management solutions exist, Riot asserts that employee security has been overlooked for too long.
The company’s pitch deck outlines where their product fits within the cybersecurity landscape:
“Our platform will autonomously evaluate the security practices of employees… and assign a score, which we term a karma score, indicative of the employee’s security posture,” Netter stated.
Following that, Riot will encourage employees to modify settings or enable multifactor authentication where necessary. “These are small adjustments that may take just a minute or two, yet they significantly hinder hackers,” Netter emphasized.
This initiative poses a notable challenge for Riot since employee security also hinges on personal device and service usage. Phishing attempts are increasingly occurring on platforms like WhatsApp, while LinkedIn profiles are often leveraged for social engineering attacks.
Consequently, this innovative security product will resemble a consumer-oriented offering, featuring appealing animations and gamification elements to motivate users to enhance their security measures.
“My long-term aspiration is to create a comprehensive employee security company, providing an entire suite of tools for employee protection. It’s conceivable that one day we could develop — to illustrate a whimsical example — an antivirus solution or a password manager,” Netter expressed.
Initially, thanks to the latest funding round, the company is now better positioned for rapid expansion. The team intends to establish new offices in different countries and broaden its client base to support the development of these advanced products.
Compiled by Techarena.au.
Fanpage: TechArena.au
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