Over the next few weeks we’ll be showcasing the winners of our Elevator Pitch LIVE 2016 competition.
This week, we’re shining the light on our Cybersecurity Startup of the Year: Intruder.
Over 200 companies applied for the competition, a number that was then whittled down to 25 finalists across the following categories: Cybersecurity, FinTech, HealthTech, PropTech and AdTech/MarTech.
On a live pitching day, a panel of five judges cast their votes to decide on one winner in each category.
Watch the short video to find out more about Intruder, where the idea come from, what traction it has gained to date and what it has planned for the future.
Q: Hi Chris, thanks for joining us, can you tell me about Intruder?
Sure, so Intruder is an online platform that companies can use to find their cybersecurity weaknesses and fix them before they get breached. And the way that works is companies just tell us where their systems are on the internet and we do the rest. So we run regular assessments looking for the kinds of weaknesses that hackers could exploit and then we help companies fix them.
Q: And where did the idea come from?
So I was working in the security team at a large finance organisation and they have tools that do these kinds of things already, but they’re designed for security experts and they’re very difficult to use. That made me wonder what other companies are doing and that’s when I teamed up with a friend of mine, an ethical hacker and we set out to create a platform that was simple to use, easy to understand and always on in the background, so companies don’t have to spend time doing this stuff.
Q:What sort of success and traction have you gained so far?
Yeah, really good. So we’re into the double digits with our customers now and we’ve just signed up our first customer from a channel partnership which we’ve been working on for a while, so we’re really excited about that as well.
Q: And what does the rest of 2017 hold for Intruder?
So we’re looking to take our customer numbers into the triple digits this year and to do that we’re currently raising a Seed investment round. So we’ve bootstrapped everything to date, so it’ll be really nice to have some money to spend on sales and marketing and we also want to bring a developer onto the team, because we’ve built a great platform already, but we want to make it fantastic.