Riot, a France-based startup making the platform that makes it easy to prepare your employees for cyberattacks, raised $12 million in Series A funding to iterate on its all-in-one cybersecurity awareness platform for businesses and their employees. 

The round was led by Base10, with participation from angel investors such as Snyk’s founder Guy Podjarny, Duolingo’s co-founder Severin Hacker, Supercell’s co-founder Ilkka Paananen, Deel’s co-founder Alex Bouaziz, and Slack’s CPO Tamar Yehoshua.

Some of Riot’s existing investors also put more money on the table, such as Y Combinator, Funders Club, and Founders Future.

Riot originally focused on fake phishing campaigns. It now also offers customized educational content that can help grow the cybersecurity culture in a team.

The main interface of Riot is a chatbot called Albert. It is available on Slack, Microsoft Teams, or through a web interface. Each course is interactive and the content changes dynamically depending on each employee’s cybersecurity knowledge.

“I read a study from the 1980s and they were looking at the effectiveness of each teaching method,” Riot founder and CEO Benjamin Netter. “With one-to-one relationships, when you teach someone individually, the student is better than a student who attends normal classes in 98% of cases. We can’t have a teacher per student at scale, but we try to create these one-to-one relationships.”

Company: Riot Security, Inc.

Raised: $12.0M 

Round: Series A

Funding Month: February 2023

Lead Investors: Base10

Additional Investors: Guy Podjarny, Severin Hacker, Ilkka Paananen, Alex Bouaziz, Tamar Yehoshua, Y Combinator, Funders Club, and Founders Future

Company Website: https://tryriot.com/

Software Category: Cybersecurity Awareness Platform

About the Company: Riot provides an all-in-one cybersecurity awareness platform for businesses and their employees. It protects a company by preparing employees to deal with cyberattacks. The company's platform runs fake phishing campaigns on employees and secures products and internal tools by two-factor authentication, enabling companies to educate their employees about security breaches. Riot recently passed the $2 million milestone in annual recurring revenue. Overall, Riot reaches 100,000 employees across its clients, like Y Combinator, Deel, Intercom, and Le Monde.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/riot-prepares-your-team-against-highly-sophisticated-cyberattacks