ECSO’s quarterly virtual discussions on the European cybersecurity market are back with the Q1 2024 edition: Decoding European Cybersecurity Market Trends: A virtual discussion for ECSO Members – How to expand to the US market? took place online on 24 April 2024 with Francisco Andrade e Silva, Market and Regional Policies Junior Manager at ECSO, and guest speaker Luigi Lenguito, founder and CEO at Bfore AI.
The event started with the presentation of ECSO’s Q1 2024 Cybersecurity Investment and M&A Report by Francisco Andrade e Silva. The key takeaways from ECSO’s report include a very slow start to investment in cybersecurity in 2024, with 17% to 44% decrease in investment and a 25% decrease in M&A activity when compared to Q1 2023. Furthermore, the report confirmed that 20% of M&As since 2023 have non-EU actors as the acquirers, and 6 out of 10 top investors this quarter were from the US.
Luigi Lenguito, founder and CEO of BforeAI, proceeded with his keynote Market Expansion: How to Expand to the USA Market. He started with a brief presentation of BforeAI and how it successfully managed to expand to the US market, followed by the announcement of their newly closed Series A round led by SYN Ventures, a US investor. The round will help foster growth in the US market and invest in local sales, according to the founder. Lenguito’s keynote concluded with an argumentation on the benefits of European cybersecurity providers in expanding to the US and what outcomes they must look for to optimize their landing on the market.
The conversation continued with a Q&A session with our speakers. The attendees made excellent use of this opportunity to collaboratively analyse the results of ECSO’s Q1 2024 Cybersecurity Investment and M&A Report and further inquire BforeAI’s CEO on their American journey, such as what are the best KPIs to monitor product to market fit, the need for a local sales team, and key advice to someone undertaking this market expansion.
With this virtual discussion, ECSO continues to support its Members and engage them in knowledge sharing sessions to facilitate best practice exchange and networking. If you are not an ECSO Member and you would like to contribute to these discussions, we invite you to check out our Membership page to discover the application process and all the benefits of joining our community.
About ECSO’s “Decoding European Cybersecurity Market Trends” initiative:
The “Decoding European Cybersecurity Market Trends: A virtual discussion for ECSO Members” sessions are a series of events organised throughout the year, that aim to capture and disseminate the biggest cybersecurity trends in private investment and M&As to ECSO members, as well as invite experts to share insights on the market.
In addition to this, ECSO publishes a monthly European Cybermarket report, a quarterly market snapshot, and a yearly report; providing an overview of cybersecurity-related funding, M&As, and new investment funds in the European cybersecurity market. This initiative is part of the Cybersecurity Market Development Working Group.
