Guardz, the cybersecurity company securing and insuring small businesses, has raised an $18-million Series A round led by Glilot+, the early growth fund of Glilot Capital Partners.

Guardz’s existing investors Hanaco Ventures, iAngels, and GKFF Ventures participated in the oversubscribed round and were joined by new investors ClearSky. The investment comes less than a year after Guardz launched with $10-million in seed funding, bringing its total funding to date to $28-million.

Since emerging from stealth, Guardz has achieved product-market fit, optimising its holistic cybersecurity offering for the managed service providers (MSPs) who serve small businesses. In less than a year, Guardz has experienced rapid growth, partnering with hundreds of MSPs and securing thousands of the businesses they manage in the US and Europe.

The new funds raised will be used to fuel the company’s commercial growth and accelerate product development to increase cybersecurity coverage, as well as to expand sales, marketing, and customer success operations globally.

The Guardz cybersecurity platform empowers MSPs to seamlessly manage their numerous small business customers’ cyber posture, subscription plans, and remediation from a single, multi-tenant platform with a simple and cost-effective approach.

“MSPs are at the forefront of protecting small businesses, which underpin the US economy, and we are on a mission to empower them to do so better and more efficiently,” says Dor Eisner, CEO and co-founder of Guardz. “We are proud to enable our MSP partners to ensure not only small businesses’ cybersecurity posture, but also the longevity of their businesses. The time is now to double down on our successful go-to-market machine and equip even more MSPs to do so.”

Lior Litwak, managing partner and head of Glilot+, says: “When we met the exceptional team at Guardz, which combines cybersecurity leaders with small business go-to-market experts, it became evident that they had built the ultimate solution for small business cybersecurity – a longstanding and rapidly growing market need we’ve been monitoring at Glilot for a while.

“Guardz has developed an impressive, holistic, and user-friendly cybersecurity and cyber insurance risk-assessment platform that is cleverly tailored to MSPs, who serve the often-overlooked long-tail small business market. We are excited to lead this funding round and join the Guardz team on their journey to secure the digital world for those who today need it most.”