Scaling Cyber

Europe’s cybersecurity talent gap isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a human capital problem — and one that became dramatically more urgent in 2025, when geopolitical shifts quietly pulled the financial rug out from under the continent’s most active cybersecurity community builder. Anett Mádi-Nátor , President of the Women for Cyber Foundation and Managing Partner at CyEx.hu, joined Scaling Cybe...

Most cybersecurity founders obsess over their product. Mateusz Wepa obsesses over something else entirely: the channel. And in less than two years, that obsession helped him build IITD’s Polish operation from 5 people to 12, a growing network of dedicated partners, and a reputation for being the most responsive distributor in the market. Guest Journey Mateusz Wepa came up through the world of tech...

Most companies assume their data is safe because it lives in the cloud. Most engineering teams assume their source code is protected because it’s on GitHub. Most CISOs don’t think about DevOps data until an auditor asks — or until something goes wrong. Lukasz Jesis thought about it before most people did. And it led him to build two of the most focused data protection companies coming out of Europ...

Most security operations centers collapse under their own complexity. They promise to support every vendor, every SIEM, every workflow. They chase features instead of focusing on what actually matters: operational efficiency. Federico Meiners learned this the hard way. After a failed attempt to build a SOC in the United States, he joined Nynox (now ACEN) in Belgium and spent five years discovering...

For years, the cybersecurity industry has operated on a false premise: that you must choose between speed and values, between aggressive American scaling and thoughtful European principles. Cody Barrow , CEO of EclecticIQ, is proving that’s wrong. From Intelligence Officer to CEO Cody spent over 20 years in intelligence, half of that in the US federal government. He wasn’t just a practitioner; he...

For decades, Europe has talked about digital sovereignty and cyber resilience. But talking isn’t building. And according to Petri Kuivala — a veteran CISO who helped secure Nokia, Microsoft, and NXP, and now advises European cybersecurity startups including HoxHunt — the problem isn’t just political. It’s cultural, strategic, and deeply rooted in how European CISOs approach security itself. In thi...

Europe imports 70% of the cybersecurity products it uses. That number isn’t just an economic statistic. It’s a strategic vulnerability. And while the debate around digital sovereignty often stays at the policy level, a small group of builders in France is doing something different: writing a new playbook from scratch . In this episode of Scaling Cyber , I sat down with Laurent Hausermann and Aurél...

The cybersecurity industry is often framed as a US and Israel story. Silicon Valley drives category creation. Tel Aviv drives elite technical innovation. Europe? Fragmented, underfunded, slower to scale. But what does the actual data say? In this opening episode of Season 2 of Scaling Cyber , we sat down with Richard Stiennon , Founder of IT-Harvest — one of the most comprehensive cybersecurity ma...

Season 1 of Scaling Cyber showcased ambitious cybersecurity founders building outside the traditional US and Israel hubs. Season 2 asks a harder question: Why do some regions consistently produce global cybersecurity leaders while others struggle to scale beyond their borders? This season moves beyond individual stories and into structural reality. From Founder Stories to System Thinking The first...

Email impersonation isn’t as flashy as other threat vectors. And yet, it’s one of the most abused attack vectors in the world. In this episode of Scaling Cyber , I sat down with Sacha Matulovich , Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Sendmarc , to unpack how a company born in South Africa built a global business around one of cybersecurity’s most overlooked — and most critical — problems: emai...

The cloud promised speed, scale, and efficiency. What it didn’t promise — but absolutely delivered — is complexity. And inside that complexity hide the blind spots that attackers love more than anything else. Most companies think they’re secure. They have a CSPM. They have a CNAPP. They follow compliance. Their dashboards are green. And yet, they still get hacked. In this episode of Scaling Cyber...

When organizations talk about cybersecurity, they usually talk about the tools: EDR, SIEM, AI detection, automation. But behind nearly every breach, one constant remains: people still click . For decades, the industry has tried to fix that with templated phishing simulations that are often outdated, unrealistic, and far removed from the real attacks employees receive daily. But what if cyber secur...

Most cybersecurity companies build for enterprises. Some build for governments. Very few build for telcos — and even fewer manage to transform telco networks into massive cybersecurity distribution engines. Whalebone did exactly that. Founded in Brno almost a decade ago, Whalebone spent years growing steadily — 100% YoY, every year, for nine years straight — before hitting a global inflection poin...

For more than a decade, SecOps teams have been overwhelmed by alerts, data gaps, fragmented tooling, and the limits of human capacity. Even the most advanced SOCs still operate with a simple truth: humans can’t investigate everything — and many threats never trigger an alert at all. But what if that limitation disappeared? In this episode of Scaling Cyber , Almog Ohayon shares how TandemTrace is p...

Cybercriminals have long felt like they hold all the power. But what if defenders could flip the script , turning the attackers into the confused ones, lost in a web of fake systems and dead ends? That’s exactly what Labyrinth is doing. Born in Ukraine , built in Poland , and expanding worldwide, the company is leading the new wave of cyber deception , a strategy that lures intruders into decoys,...

For decades, cybersecurity was about protecting networks and devices. Now, the battlefield has expanded to our screens, our feeds, and our minds. In this episode of Scaling Cyber , we explore how LetsData , a Ukrainian startup born out of real conflict, is helping governments and enterprises detect information operations and disinformation campaigns to prevent and mitigate the harm they cause. 🎧...

When the entire cybersecurity industry started chanting “assume breach,” Luigi Lenguito refused to accept that being a victim was inevitable. After nearly two decades at Dell , he left the corporate world to build something radically different — a company that could predict and prevent attacks before they happen . 🎧 Listen to the full conversation on Scaling Cyber: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podca...

Welcome to Scaling Cyber , the podcast that shines a spotlight on cybersecurity founders and leaders outside the US and Israel — from Europe, LATAM, Africa, APAC, and beyond. Hosted by Ignacio Sbampato — cybersecurity executive, entrepreneur, investor, and former Chief Business Officer at ESET — this show brings you authentic, founder-led stories of how ambitious startups are scaling globally, ove...