We’re exited to announce that Cymmetria – the cyber security startup providing smart defences targeted against determined attackers – has exited stealth and is part of the Seedcamp family.
Seedcamp participated in an earlier round along-side Felicis Ventures, Y Combinator and a select group of other angel investors.
As well as receiving our investment, Cymmetria receives full access to Seedcamp Week London, Academy, Mentors, Network, and our US Trip.
Seedcamp Partner, Carlos Espinal says, “Online Security continues to be an unsolved complex challenge for companies in an increasingly complex network environment blending on-premise installations with cloud services. With founders including the head of PwC’s Cyber Security Centre of Excellence in Israel and VP of Cybersecurity Strategy at Kaspersky Lab, Cymmetria seeks to bring painless integration and low-impact administration into the equation. At Seedcamp we’re passionate and excited to be supporting this great team and their ambition to scale globally.”
The company helps improve the defences of businesses against cyber attacks by creating smart decoys that trick the attacker into thinking they’ve successfully compromised their victim’s network. All this happens in real-time, making it easier for the business to detect and mitigate a security breach.
To find out more about Cymmetria, head over to their website.
This guest post is written by Jonathan Arad, Co-founder & CMO of wanna, the place where parents can safely buy and sell products & services, locally!
Jonathan speaking about wanna during Onboarding Week
Sitting at my desk in our London offices writing this post, I can’t help but wonder how we got here…
What incredible fortunes, twists and turns brought us to this point?
It’s hard for a young Israeli startup to stand out. Israel is often referred to as the startup nation and for a good reason. Walking down the street, it’s hard not to bump into a founder or investor in one of the countless startup companies operating from Israel. When starting wanna we always had our sights on expanding internationally, but a local launch seemed like a good idea to validate the concept, technology, team, and eventually raise capital.
However, taking a company away from its home base is no easy task. It’s difficult enough to build a company where you know the culture and people, rules and regulations, so imagine how hard it is doing it somewhere you know none of those in advance!
That’s the reason we decided to find a partner. We worked hard – and I mean hard – to find a partner that could help us achieve the thing we needed to do next – to be a local success story outside Israel.
We were thrilled to be accepted into Seedcamp. It’s been a life changing event in the life of wanna. There’s just no way to exaggerate what a profound impact the program has had.
If I could give Israeli entrepreneurs just one advice it would be to join a programme like Seedcamp – the sooner the better.
wanna is a very local app in the sense that it allows parents to buy and sell from one another, locally. We were anxious to be on the ground and meet our audience face to face, learning about the local available tools for startups, creating relationships, cooperation, hiring new people, and much more. This was all facilitated by the fact we had a home in Seedcamp. I can’t imagine doing this on our own.
Allow me to share three short examples how this manifested for us in the hopes to convey the importance I mentioned earlier:
During the first week of Seedcamp founders of all the companies sit for eight hours each day and are bombarded with information, data, guidelines, KPIs, rules, and benefits which probably covers most of the “things you need to know as a startup founder” info all in a week’s time. This is both high level inspiring stuff, but also down to earth action items with daily homework assignments.
Devin Hunt, Partner at Founder Centric leading an Onboarding Week session
Surprisingly, the most important thing I took from this week has nothing to do with any of those things – I found the best and most important resource for knowledge is the founders themselves!
It is just amazing how different people, from different backgrounds, with different ideas, all have common problems. The solution to those problem is sometimes much simpler than one thinks, as someone else in the room likely already solved that very problem not too long ago. Onboarding Week allowed all of us to get know one another, our expertise and experience.
This is HUGE. Seedcamp has a vast network of mentors consisting of accomplished founders and executives, Seedcamp alumni, friends, friends of friends, and other leading experts in their various fields (product, finance, law, VC, marketing, PR, operations, and more). Having the opportunity to pick the right mentor to talk to, when the time’s most important for you, is invaluable. The advice of an expert at the right time can save so much time, money, and effort.
As a foreign team we always need intros. Actually the local teams also need them, but we need more as we know less people and companies here. These intros come in all shapes and forms; from a personal warm supportive intro, to a cold distant mail. The fact we have the connection to both other founders and the Seedcamp network, gives us a chance to be introduced not only to the best in every field – including investors – but to be introduced personally in the very best way. Again, invaluable.
So we’ve established it’s hard to start a company, harder to do it abroad, and even harder to succeed alone. One of the keys to early stage success is utilising the people you know to help you whenever you can.
In the ‘Seedcamp Podcast Series’ we talk with key people in the tech startup industry to hear their stories and gleam key advice and learnings from their experiences.
We caught up with Andy McLoughlin to talk about his experience raising investment for Huddle, growing the business, his latest experience as an investor at SoftTech VC, and some of the lessons he’d tell his younger self.
After graduating with a degree in Economics, Andy switched careers to work at a telco company where, amongst other things, he implemented a document management system. This and his experience handling documents and collaboration at subsequent jobs, was the inspiration for Huddle – the world’s leading Enterprise content collaboration platform. With some success under his belt, Andy recently joined SoftTech VC as Venture Partner.
If the above player doesn’t work for you, you can also listen directly from our Soundcloud page.
Listen to similar episodes like this:
Subscribe on iTunes or by pointing your podcast player to the link below…
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:126198189/sounds.rss
In the ‘Seedcamp Podcast Series’ we talk with key people in the tech startup industry to hear their stories and gleam key advice and learnings from their experiences.
We had to sit down with Sales & Partnerships guru and Seedcamp mentor, Daniel King to ask him about how startups can start thinking about building out a Sales organisation.
Daniel is an executive leader with more than 15 years experience in Senior Management, with a focus on Digital and Online Media, Retail and eCommerce technology, Data, BI, Analytics, SaaS platforms and Market Research. Extensive knowledge in investing, advising, and scaling high-growth companies including international expansion. Hands-on experience in building, managing, developing and retaining teams.
Daniel is on the board of many companies and has an amazing track record of companies he’s helped scale. You can learn more about him and get in touch with him over on his LinkedIn page.
If the above player doesn’t work for you, you can also listen directly from our Soundcloud page.
Listen to similar episodes like this:
Subscribe on iTunes or by pointing your podcast player to the link below…
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:126198189/sounds.rss
In the ‘Seedcamp Podcast Series’ we talk with key people in the tech startup industry to hear their stories and gleam key advice and learnings from their experiences.
In this edition of the Seedcamp Podcast Series, Carlos Espinal talks with Taylor Wescoatt (Expert in Residence at Seedcamp) about his background in Product and UX, and how it led to him developing the Behavioural Product Roadmap model which is specifically optimised for startups.
During the first of a three-part series, they discuss Taylor’s involvement with and key learnings from, CitySearch, Netscape, Seatwave, eBay, and Time Out.
If the above player doesn’t work for you, you can also listen directly from our Soundcloud page.
Listen to similar episodes like this:
Subscribe on iTunes or by pointing your podcast player to the link below…
http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:126198189/sounds.rss
This article was written by Carlos Espinal, Partner at Seedcamp – Europe’s leading Acceleration Fund. Providing up to $250k capital and access to its Academy learning programme, startups also have access to an active network of Europe’s top mentors and investors.
Across society there is an increasing trend of experiences eclipsing that of owning material goods. We’re seeing this trend increasingly in action around the globe.
Some articles (U.S.News via Yahoo / Fast Company / NPR) have explained why millennials, for example, are choosing to live for experiences and less for ‘things’ (or at least the ownership of things). If and when they do buy things… there is a trend to buy things that have stories behind them and things that are longer-lasting. While the generational explanation helps explain an increase in some services and products, other articles simply point to economic stagnation as a main catalyst for the growth of the sharing economy. Economic concerns have also affected the luxury goods demand from Russia and China.
In addition to generational trends and economic circumstances, increasingly popular sociological movements like the tiny-house movement and the minimalism movement are promoting a simplified life that focuses on doing vs owning – and if you do own, have it be something that you’re likely to get value out of for a while (thus forcing a view towards higher quality affordable goods that don’t make you feel like they have designed obsolescence nor are about showing off).
Taking these trends into consideration, at Seedcamp we’re bullish on startups that bring experiences, meaning, convenience, and quality durable products to the market and/or allow for people to share products they own (enabled by tech to help them scale).
Below, is a list of Seedcamp companies that enable and participate in this trend:
Copyright © 2019 Seedcamp
Website design × Point Studio