To become great, it takes more than just watching professionals; you actually have to practice in real life situations. Vequrity knows just this. At Verqurity you are given real cyber-security training in real situations. Leave Powerpoint for your financial meetings and provide your cyber-security with actual practical training.
Recently accepted into Barclays’ Accelerator program in NYC, Taavi Must takes us through his startup.
Tell us about the decision to apply for Barclays Accelerator.
The idea to apply to the accelerator program occurred accidentally. We met with one of the Techstars managing directors in London and gave him a short intro about us, after which he encouraged us to send in our application to the NYC program. So we applied to both, and we are delighted to be here.
Tell us about your product or service.
Vequrity develops a cloud-based simulator and platform to provide live cyber security training for IT personnel. Our aim is to make humans the strongest link in the defense line of cyber battle.
How is it different?
Unlike traditional powerpoint based training, we offer engaging, hands on games for developing practical cyber security skills. Every participant gets his own real IT environment that they have to protect against live attacks. Our simulated environment involves vulnerable servers, and participants have to first find weak points and then choose appropriate defense tactics. During the simulated battle, participants get hints and suggestions that guide them to a solution. We believe that learning by doing is the most natural and efficient way to improve skills.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
Our target market is the global IT community. Currently, we are working tightly with Barclays to understand how our approach fits in to the enterprise. Second step is to cooperate with universities.
What is the business model?
Revenue streams include: subscription fees, customized trainings for enterprises, and platform rent fee.
What inspired you to start the company?
There were several coincidences but two main factors majorly influenced our development. We all were involved with organizing NATO cyber exercises in Estonia for several years and saw how effective, hands-on training really works. We also noticed that only the military could afford such training because preparing the process is very long and expensive. Therefore, we started to figure out alternative solutions to deliver the much-needed skill set. Margus, our CTO, struggled for years with the same problem when he was a lecturer at an Estonian IT College. From his work and development, our platform was born.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We are on track to get paying customers and, at the same time, are ready to scale our solution across geographies and various industries that are IT intensive. Our proprietary technology, by nature, can be adapted to a wide variety of use-cases.
What is the one piece of business advice that you never got?
To be successful in the US market, you have to be aggressive. We experienced a lot of cultural differences when we arrived here and each day is a new learning experience.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be and why?
We would be honored to meet Bob Goodman of Bessemer Venture Partners. With his focus on security and his prior investments in on-demand security services firm SilverSky and SaaS information security provider CloudLock, we believe we would be able to learn a lot from his experience in this space.
