Hornetsecurity acquires cybersecurity training experts, IT-Seal

Hornetsecurity has acquired IT-Seal, a security awareness training company. This is the latest in a spate of growth-boosting acquisitions by Hornetsecurity since 2019, where the company purchased Spamina, the Spanish market leader for cloud email security solutions; followed by its British market Partner EveryCloud, in 2020; Altaro, a global provider of backup solutions and Zerospam, a Canadian email security leader, both in 2021. Backed by Verdane, the specialist Northern European growth equity investor, and PSG Equity, a growth equity firm partnering with software and technology-enabled services companies to help accelerate their growth, the company grew to 400 employees and a strong international network of 5,000+ channel partners in recent years.

Helping companies establish a sustainable security culture

Located in Darmstadt, Germany, IT-Seal specialises in establishing a sustainable security culture. It employs innovative technologies to train employees at businesses and organizations worldwide. The company uses a scientific, patented security awareness indicator (Employee Security Index - ESI®) to make security awareness measurable and comparable.

IT-Seals activities stem from the position that every person makes an important contribution to everyone’s IT security. As a result, the company focuses on the human factor, with the vision to help secure both the digital society and the economy.

The three co-founders, David Kelm, Alex Wyllie and Yannic Ambach, will remain on board and continue to develop the product and its range of services.

Boosting the cybersecurity awareness-prevention-detection cycle

Daniel Hofmann, CEO of Hornetsecurity, explained that each of Hornetsecurity’s strategic acquisitions serve to enhance and extend the company’s position as a leading provider of security, data loss prevention and compliance solutions, with a particular focus on the Microsoft 365 environment.

He said: “We believe IT-Seal is a perfect addition to our portfolio. We always stress the importance of cybersecurity awareness to our partners and customers, and we provide this via informative and educational blog posts, ebooks, webinars and reports. With IT-Seal on board, we will now provide IT security training as part of our package. This enables us to cover all aspects of the awareness-prevention-detection cycle, alongside our established email security and backup and recovery solutions.”

Patented methodology to measure and compare security levels

Daniel Hofmann added that the selection of IT-Seal is the result of a thorough exploration of the field: “We have searched long and hard for the right addition to our team, and with IT-Seal we have found a second-generation approach to security awareness. Other solutions in this space are too complex and too maintenance-intensive for customers. Through its automated approach, IT-Seal can measure and compare the human security level across industries by their patented technology.”

Easy-to-use IT training workflow

David Kelm, idea generator and co-founder at IT-Seal, said: “We are proud to be considered one of the most successful German cybersecurity start-ups. This acquisition is the perfect next step in our journey. Forming part of the Hornetsecurity Group will extend our services’ reach in the global B2B community, introducing our security training services to companies and organizations of all sizes and in all industries. This is in line with our mission to enable IT security managers to train their employees individually and reliably through our award-winning automation engine and easy-to-use workflow so that they can protect their company.”