Meet Hackurity, Member of Rotterdam/Cybersecurity's Momentum 10

Congratulations on being a part of the Momentum 10, the elite top 10 startups who demonstrated truly exceptional drive and progress in the year 2024. The Momentum 10 Interview Series will delve into the unique journeys and powerful foundations propelling your startups to the top in the 2024 Startups of The Year campaign!

Tell us about you.

We are Hackurity, founded in 2021 with the mission to bring cost-effective, continuous and layered cybersecurity that cover the gaps in existing, modern security tools of organisations’ cybersecurity. We do this through sophisticated autonomous testing, supported with the human insights and expertise that smaller IT teams lack. It’s our ambition to become one of Europe’s largest cybersecurity companies and be the one stop shop for cybersecurity for any organisation. Since our first day in 2021, we’ve now grown into a team of 9 and helping dozens of customers across Europe staying safe from cyberattacks.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

Our cybersecurity solutions are designed for prevention, rather than resolving issues. We replicate cyberattacks on a organisation using existing vulnerabilities, test internal networks for vulnerabilities and use Dark web crawlers to find compromised user accounts. All these efforts focus on finding and resolving vulnerabilities before they can become a risk to the organisation. Through our autonomous solutions, combined with our remediation support, we help IT teams and organisations identifying and resolving vulnerabilities based on contextualisation of risk to the business and by eliminating 99% of false positives, we save our clients precious time.

What sets you apart from the competition?

Our competitors are either fully automated through AI, which comes with ethical and legal pitfalls and limitations of updating their model. Training AI models costs lots of money and time and pentesters to execute the training. Other competitors are manual pentesters, which are highly expensive, provide only snapshots in security reporting and can be disruptive to business operations.

Hackurity created autonomous testing through DevOps rather than AI, by automating most tasks of a pentester. Blend in our human insights and expertise through quarterly manual pentesting to support the autonomous testing, we provide the perfect mix to our customers. In addition, we are unique with our strong human remediation support to our clients to resolve any uncovered vulnerability and consultative advice on all cybersecurity topics.

What does it mean for you to be in the Momentum 10?

It’s a great feeling to achieve this result, it shows great recognition to the entire team. Building a startup into a success is not an easy task With a strong dedicated team on a mission to provide highest quality cybersecurity solutions we’re achieving just that.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to set out for this mission?

Every one in our growing team are fully dedicated to our mission and has such a strong intrinsic motivation to achieve our goals. Each and every member of the Hackurity team is a true A-player and belong to the best in the world in their respective fields. The togetherness of the team, despite some work fully remote, is stronger than I have felt in any other organisation. We truly believe that we’re creating a better and safer connected world for organisations, protecting IP, our data held by so many companies we do business with and ultimately leave the digital world safer for the next generation.

Looking back, what milestone was the biggest turning point for your startup?

The primary milestone of course is winning our first client. That proved product/market fit. But even more importantly is hitting a client retention rate of 95%, proving that our solutions and support provide value to our customers’ cybersecurity.

What’s one valuable lesson you learned this year that you’d pass on to other startups?

Find the right product/market fit, once you have that run with it. Sell it to customers, don’t keep adding features, buttons and options, create revenue and cash flow. Once you achieve that, that’s when you can finetune the solutions you have further. You have a customer base you can ask for feedback on what to implement and when you do, customer satisfaction increases, which in turn lead to higher customer retention.

How do you envision your industry evolving in the coming years, and how will your startup stay ahead?

The cybersecurity industry will evolve in two ways. Firstly, at present it’s a highly competitive landscape where large, established players compete with innovative startups like Hackurity. In the coming years we’ll see strong consolidation where the large players will acquire smaller, innovative competitors. Secondly, AI will be implemented broader and more often within all aspects of cybersecurity. The AI models will become stronger, faster and more capable, albeit they’ll never fully replace manual insights. Hackurity will stay ahead through accelerating our growth in coming year, entering new markets and using that cash flow to implement AI more dominantly within our solutions. Hopefully, our growth will allow us to stay independent or be a player making the acquisitions.

How do you or your company intend to bring forward the Momentum 10 inspirations in 2025?

Achieving this title helps us build further credibility and visibility within our industry and target audience.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2025?

Our key goal is to accelerate our growth. After 8x growth in 2024, we’re aiming for 4x growth this year. Through development we’ll be able to target new market segments and if we can achieve that before the Summer holidays, we can open up an entire new market. That would open the possibility of 10x growth. We’re also hoping to find the right investor for seed funding to partner with us.

2024 has been crazy, with all the new techs, and all the geopolitics fluctuations. What are the impacts of these to your startup, and to your industry as a whole? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

Obviously with geopolitical tensions, we’re seeing the reliance on digital tools for nearly everything. This exposes us to the possibility of cyber warfare. We’re seeing the convergence of cybercrime and cyber warfare through cyberheists executed by North Korea, we’ve seen foreign adversaries penetrating governmental institutions and infrastructure. Combined with regulations around cybersecurity, we see that this topic is much higher on the agenda for organisations than used to be. As a result, we see both increased demand and competition.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

It’s been a great experience to work with HackerNoon. As a publication it provides great insights and wide variety of content.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

Whatever industry you’re in, you should never start a business with the idea to become rich. If money is the sole purpose of starting or building a business you’ll ultimately will fail. You must have the right idea to solve a problem or challenge for your target market in a way that incumbent businesses can’t, or you have an intrinsic desire to create a better world or environment. Only with such intrinsic motivation you’ll succeed.