Lupin & Holmes, named after Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, has captured lead investment from Harry Stebbings' 20VC and Seedcamp.
A French cybersecurity startup founded by a 23-year-old who made a name for himself as a professional “bug bounty hunter”, earning hundreds of thousands of pounds from Facebook and Google in rewards, has raised a $5.9m pre-seed round.
Lupin & Holmes, named after Arsène Lupin (the fictional master thief, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc, which went on to become a Netflix show) and Sherlock Holmes, the startup has captured lead investment from Harry Stebbings’ 20VC and Seedcamp.
Kima Ventures, Purple Ventures and the founders of Hugging Face and Wiz also invested. Founder Roni Carta made a name for himself as a hacker early in life, inspired by Lupin. At the age of 17, he spent several years as a senior security engineer and “professional bug bounty hunter”, effectively a researcher paid by companies to legally hack and find security vulnerabilities before criminals do.
He would get a ”bounty” reward from companies depending on the severity of his findings. By age 23, he had earned nearly $800,000 in rewards from Fortune 500 and FAANG companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix and was named Most Valuable Hacker at two of Google’s Live Hacking Events.
His endeavours earned him a job “red teaming”, security testing, at ManoMano, the French e-commerce company. With his earnings through hacking, he invested into R&D for his startup. His key insight, which is central to his startup, is that hackers were not breaking through the front door, but were moving through the upstream layers of a company’s code. With this in mind, the startup has built an upstream security platform for enterprises.
The startup says its platform, called Depi, maps real attack paths, giving enterprises the chance to spot attacks before they happen. Carta says the startup has several Fortune 500 clients. He names Ledger, the French security platform, as one client.
On bagging a high pre-seed round, Carta said: “It is higher because we have some traction. We have a track record of helping the major tech companies in the world. We have some interesting early clients, mostly Fortune 500 companies, which makes our company more interesting than others for a pre-seed round. We are really grounded in the hacking culture. We prevent them proactively. I feel that this hacker culture is really important for us.”
The startup is hiring around 10 people. The funds from the funding round will be used to “hack the planet”, for research purposes and more investment into the product. Lupin & Holmes had two co-founders, but Carta is now running it alone.