OutKept, a Belgium-based cybersecurity company that helps to prevent phishing, has raised €500,000 in a seed round from Presto Ventures and angel investors. The investment will be used to scale the platform internationally.
- Co-founded by Simon Bauwens and Dieter Tinel, OutKept provides a phishing simulation platform. It helps organizations reduce human cyber risk with automated high-quality phishing simulations that are created on their platform by an open community of ethical phishers. The startup claims that in just 2 to 3 months, it can reduce the amount of interactions with phishing emails by half.
- OutKept already operates in 20 countries and has a couple of hundreds phishers communities, tripling in size over the course of 2023.
The investment details
Current seed round was provided in equity by:
- Presto Ventures, a Prague-based VC firm focusing on early-stage B2B software startups and online marketplaces from the wider CEE region. Recently, Presto Ventures led a $330,000 pre-seed round for Wempler, a Georgian marketplace for task delegation.
- Business Angels Network Flanders, a company based in Hasselt, Belgium, specializing in fundraising and administrative and support services. The company offers a range of services including dealguiding, fundraising, networking, investment management, international funding, and presents a community business angels.
Our investment in OutKept reflects our confidence in their unique approach to tackling phishing threats. OutKept’s strategy of crowdsourcing potential phishing emails and educating their clients’ employees aligns perfectly with the current needs of enterprise security, especially in the face of increasingly sophisticated AI-fueled social engineering attacks. This proactive and educational approach is a key player in strengthening the weakest link in current enterprise cybersecurity: human awareness,
Eduard Kucera, Partner of Presto Ventures, commented on the deal.
Outkept plans to use the fresh round to scale the platform internationally and bring its approach for higher quality phishing simulations to new markets.
