CrowdSec, the world’s first crowdsourced CTI solution, announces €14M in Series A funding to combat cybercrime

CrowdSec, the pioneering and participative Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) solution, is today announcing a €14M Series A round led by Supernova Invest and accompanied by CrowdSec’s historic investor, Breega. This new financing round will enable CrowdSec to expand its operations in the U.S. and increase its user network tenfold.

Despite billions of dollars being spent annually on high-tech cybersecurity systems, global cybercrime is an increasingly pervasive problem with hundreds of thousands of attacks on consumers, corporations and countries taking place every day.

Launched in 2020 by cybersecurity experts Philippe Humeau, Laurent Soubrevilla and Thibault Koechlin, CrowdSec is the world’s first-ever collaborative Intrusion Prevention System. A revolutionary, participative and open source (MIT license) solution, CrowdSec leverages the power of its user base (“the crowd”) to signal attacks and create a database of malicious IP addresses for all community members to block, generating a real-time, crowdsourced, threat intelligence system that can counter cyber attacks worldwide.

CrowdSec detects and deters most types of attack regardless of the evolving and increasingly sophisticated nature of cybercrime (from scalping to botting, DDoS, Ransomware, VOIP abuse, troll farms, credential bruteforce, scans and more), whilst simultaneously creating the world’s largest real-time database of cyber criminally controlled IP addresses. On average, CrowdSec users experience an instant reduction of over 90% in the number of incoming cyber attacks, a reduction that also has environmental implications by reducing unnecessary resource waste related to cyber criminality. Even if cybercriminals change the IP addresses they use to carry out attacks, CrowdSec’s network will clear out the previous one and share the new one with users  within minutes.

“At the heart of CrowdSec is a simple but powerful idea: community action. 40 years of cybersecurity has proven isolated cybersecurity defenses to be largely ineffective, regardless of the vast resources invested by companies, institutions and governments,” says CrowdSec CEO, Philippe Humeau. “CrowdSec’s unique strength lies in numbers and in applying a concerted, global approach to a global problem. Cybercriminals are outnumbered tens of thousands to one by legitimate Internet users, all of whom can now join forces to protect themselves and each other”.

At present, CrowdSec’s community spans 175 countries. The software recently hit the 100,000 installations mark, with adopters including governments, major e-commerce actors, media and financial institutions. With adoption rates increasing daily, CrowdSec is fast becoming an internationally recognized cyberdefense system of scale and efficacy.

“We have been working with CrowdSec for quite some time. Their solution not only protects our whole external perimeter, but also considerably reduces alert fatigue and lowers resource consumption,” shared Guillaume Roussel, ISS Operational Manager at Crédit Mutuel Arkea. “We are now starting to create business-oriented scenarios to detect bank-specific attacks. CrowdSec really is a game changer for us in defending our assets against cyber attacks.”

With this new funding, CrowdSec has plans to grow its team from 20 to 45 members, develop its technical stack, ramp up revenues, expand its U.S. operations and further grow its worldwide network of protected, collaborating machines from several hundred thousand to millions.

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“Supernova Invest is proud to support CrowdSec in its ambition to entirely rebuild the foundations on which cybersecurity was built, making the internet a safer place for all, from developers to large industrial corporations,” said Etienne Moreau, Partner at Supernova Invest. “Working pervasively within the existing ecosystem, CrowdSec, with its unique vision, is poised to become an intrinsic part of worldwide cybersecurity.”

On CrowdSec’s growth, Maximilien Bacot, Founding Partner at Breega, said, “We backed CrowdSec in May 2O21 because we strongly believe a global, communal approach to be the only truly effective way of dealing with rising levels of cyber crime. Just 17 months on, CrowdSec had grown their community by 3000% and identified and blocked over 7M malicious IPs used by cybercriminals to carry out attacks. An outstanding achievement that, alongside increasing global adoption figures, proves the relevance of their vision and approach. Breega is delighted to be a part of CrowdSec’s incredible journey.”