2019 got off to a good start for Passbolt. Created just two years ago and incubated at the Technoport, the start-up announced in early January the finalisation of a much larger fundraising campaign than initially planned.
“We thought we were only attracting business angels, but we realised when making our presentations that investment funds were also interested,” explains Kevin Muller, Passbolt’s co-founder and CEO. “Our initial objective was to raise around 200,000 euros and we managed to secure more than double.”
Multinational groups among its customers
The start-up has convinced two business angel networks to take part in the adventure, BeAngels (Belgium) and Yeast (France). They were joined by the Digital tech fund, the public-private seed fund managed by the venture capital company Expon Capital. Thanks to these three investors, this round table raised €460,000.
This is Passbolt’s second fundraising initiative. The start-up closed a round of funding of €210,000 in September 2017, with capital coming from private and public investors. The company had also successfully participated in Luxinnovation’s Fit 4 Start programme in the spring of 2017.
Passbolt has developed a solution for sharing passwords between employees. This aims not only to close the security gaps created by these practices, but also to improve competitiveness, particularly in the ICT sector. “All it takes is for a project manager in charge of passwords to go on vacation and a team of developers will find themselves at a standstill,” says Kevin Muller.
After more than a year of testing its solution with a community of users, Passbolt launched its commercial offer in spring 2018. Today, it has 30,000 users, including some major names from the automotive industry.
A cloud version in development
This arrival of fresh money will allow the young company to work on improving the functionalities of its solution, but also to strengthen its sales teams. Between 3 and 5 people are expected to be recruited this year.
“We want to improve the software installation process and offer a cloud service to meet the needs of smaller organisations,” adds Kevin Muller. “We also need to develop enhanced functionalities, especially for our largest customers.”
The start-up’s objective is now to reach “a minimum” of 100,000 users by the end of the year.
Photo Credit @Greg Buttay