83. seedata.io: catfishing cybercriminals to protect businesses

Founder: Matt Holland and Enrico Faccioli
Year founded: 2021
Website: https://www.seedata.io/

The mean economic loss of a UK SME following a cyber attack is £123,984 – but despite this, 16% of businesses surveyed by Sky Business said they didn’t think a cyber attack would cause an issue for business continuity.

Here at Startups, we know that despite innovation in cybersecurity constantly moving forward, hackers are still a very prevalent threat for businesses of all sizes, with many companies finding out they’ve been breached too late, by which time the damage cannot be undone.

To remedy this very real problem, Matt Holland and Enrico Faccioli cofounded Seedata.io, an automated deception platform that simplifies threat detection and helps large enterprises to uncover attackers – all, it promises, with minimal overheads and lower false positives.

US VC Aviso Ventures and Axeleo Capital, a French VC, both committed early and enthusiastically and have been great supporters,

Seedata.io customers can fill the whitespace in their environment with traps that detect and respond to potential attackers, slowing them down whilst sending alerts to security teams. In short, it’s one giant, digital decoy.

Holland believes the startup’s USP is its ease of adoption, low operating overheads and low false positives. He says a key challenge is initial customer unfamiliarity with the techniques Seedata.io uses, which required some hard work on their elevator pitch.

In the last financial year, he notes tripling Seedata.io’s average customer value as a particular highlight. That and gaining backers. “US VC Aviso Ventures and Axeleo Capital, a French VC, both committed early and enthusiastically and have been great supporters,” says Holland.

US VC Aviso Ventures and Axeleo Capital, a French VC, both committed early and enthusiastically and have been great supporters,

By 2030, Hollands hopes to either be integrated with a larger platform, or be running independently and widely adopted by end-user organisations and service providers.

We love Seedata.io’s innovative and proactive approach to planting fake IT assets to detect and capture attackers. Catfishing is the next step forward in cybersecurity!