UK startups continue to make waves by solving real problems and big challenges. In the continuation of our Featured UK Startup series, we’re glad to have Panaseer this time—a London-based startup providing enterprises and large organisations with a valuable and pragmatic cybersecurity software.

Company name: Panaseer
Founders: Nik Whitfield (CEO), Albert Plattner (Chief Commercial Officer), Charaka Goonatilake (CTO), Mike MacIntyre (VP Product & Chief Scientist) and Sophie Harrison (Chief of Staff)
Based in: London and New York
Launched: 2014

Q: In simple terms, what does your startup do?

Nik: Panaseer sells cybersecurity software that helps large, complex enterprise organisations to understand the answers to fundamental questions such as what assets they are defending and how well-protected they are.

Q: What problem/s do you seek to solve or help?

Nik: We solve the problem of poor visibility in security—companies today have low confidence in the completeness and accuracy of their knowledge about the assets they have, and how well-protected they are. This causes them real pain as their Board and their regulators are demanding to know more detail about the risk they’re carrying in cybersecurity.

Panaseer’s platform gives security teams complete and accurate visibility of an enterprise’s IT, therefore giving them confidence in the decisions they make to best secure the business. This helps them plan the most effective courses of action to reduce risk, and allows them to quickly and easily report to regulators, auditors and the Board. We call this Continuous Controls Monitoring.

Q: Are you funded and how?

Nik: Panaseer has received a total of $15M in funding from a range of UK, US and EU VCs, some early angel investors and a strategic investment from Cisco Systems.

Q: What were you doing before you started Panaseer?

Nik: I’m a computer scientist from the University of Bristol, and I’ve spent my career building different technologies for banking and security.

Q: What inspired you to start Panaseer?

Nik: Two reasons—I wanted to demonstrate that we can build businesses where people love their work, enjoy the company of their colleagues, and believe transparency and compassion are important values. And second, having built high-end threat detection platforms for banks, I realised enterprises were wasting millions on these expensive mouse-traps when they struggled to answer the most fundamental questions in security—what are we defending? Where are our protections deployed? Are they working as we expect?  

Q: What are your goals over the next five years? Where do you see yourself and Panaseer?

Nik: I would love to see big companies recognise the imperative to use data to measure security like they do in every other aspect of their business. We can no longer use gut instinct to make security decisions; the consequences are too grave. Continuous Controls Monitoring is the capability to deliver this major improvement in the security of our institutions, so I would love to see it being widely adopted.

Images courtesy of Panaseer. To learn more, visit the Panaseer website.

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