RangeForce, an Estonia and New York-based cybersecurity start-up, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Paladin Capital Group with participation from Trind Ventures. Gibb Witham from Paladin Capital Group will join the board of directors.
RangeForce helps companies deal with their cybersecurity and information security vulnerabilities by training their security specialists and IT professionals to learn the latest and most effective skills in cyber siege warfare to anticipate and fend off attacks on business critical assets. The cash injection will be used to recruit additional talent to expand the product platform.
RangeForce’s learning platform provides a progression of realistic cyber siege scenarios to train and assess technical teams’ decision-making and security skills over the entire spectrum of threat lifecycle management operations. As a result, RangeForce’s performance-based skills measurement analytics engine provides continuous evidence that teams are prepared against cybersecurity threats.
“One-size-fits-all classroom training models are obsolete, because they don’t provide actionable skills required to hold threats at bay. Our problem-based learning approach provides enterprise IT and cybersecurity teams with tangible defensive cyber warfare experience. Cloud-based simulation training in a real-time setting has shown to be the most effective cybersecurity training method at scale,” expands Taavi Must, CEO and co-founder of RangeForce.
“Finding skilled cybersecurity staff is only getting harder by the day. Our performance-based testing system supports security and tech leaders in recognizing and nurturing their cyber talent. We aim to become the industry standard to assess the most important element of cybersecurity readiness – human skill level.”
“We are thrilled to partner with RangeForce and look forward to helping them scale the company,” said Gibb Witham, Senior Vice President at Paladin Capital Group. “One of the top concerns for enterprises is today’s most overburdened and therefore weakest link in security – the human layer. RangeForce turns the weakest link into an enterprise’s strongest asset. RangeForce will continue to grow rapidly globally as companies realize that upskilling the people managing, configuring, and defending their systems may be the best ROI lever in cybersecurity.”
RangeForce has a global customer base across the financial, technology and healthcare sectors. Their clients include Microsoft, Barclays, Santander, and Pipedrive.
Paladin Capital Group was founded in 2001 and has offices in Washington DC, New York, Silicon Valley, London, and Luxembourg. As a multi-stage investor, Paladin focuses on best-of-breed companies with technologies, products and services that meet the challenging global cyber security and digital infrastructure resilience needs for commercial and government customers. Paladin has over $1 billion in committed capital across multiple funds.
Trind Ventures is an early-stage VC firm that invests in European technology start-ups with primary focus on Baltics and Finland. It prefers all things internet. Its average starting investment in portfolio company is EUR 0.2 million and it invests up to EUR 3 million in a single company.