Guardz debuts with cybersecurity-as-a-service for small businesses

Guardz, a Tel Aviv-based startup promising a broad range of out-of-the-box cybersecurity solutions for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), has announced both a successful $10 million round of seed funding and the broad availability of its flagship product.

The premise of the company’s main offering is tight API integration with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Guardz automatically enrolls all user accounts upon activation, and monitors risk posture, performs threat detection on all monitored accounts and devices, and offers one-click remediation for some threats.

Guardz provides email scanning, endpoint security, identity management, browser filtering, cloud application security and awareness and training programs for users, the company said. The product is managed from a central dashboard, providing visibility into the various individual security services it provides.

Guardz pricing aims to attract SMBs

The product’s suitability for SMB use is mainly in the pricing — there’s a free “Essentials” tier that can be used to detect risk across an organization’s digital assets and provide what Guardz, in an email, described as a “baseline understanding of the current risk posture across all digital business and activity.” The paid tier, which costs $9 per month, per user, layers in real-time monitoring for more threats, automated response, and live support. The paid tier also qualifies users to buy cyberinsurance from the company.

Moreover, Guardz’s simple onboarding procedure — simply granting the service access to main company accounts — and all-in-one architecture make it even more applicable to the SMB market.

The seed funding round, the company said in a statement, should allow Guardz to expand its feature set, further develop its cyberinsurance offering, and grow its distribution channels.

Guardz CEO and co-founder Dor Eisner said that the company looks forward to partnering with managed service providers to expand the reach of its product.

“Hackers are acutely aware of small businesses’ cyber vulnerabilities; nowadays, it’s not a matter of if they’ll be targeted, but when,” he said. “Our complete solution helps companies with lean IT, as well as MSPs, to combat these rising threats.”

Those vulnerabilities, Guardz emphasized in its announcement, are hard to overstate — the increasing accessibility of technologies and services that can be used to compromise organizational IT security puts SMBs squarely in the sights of malicious actors, while advanced cybersecurity offerings are frequently too expensive for their budgets.

“Most available cybersecurity solutions are too cumbersome to deploy, too complicated to understand and maintain, and too costly to obtain,” the company said. “As a result, small businesses are often left unprotected and without cyberinsurance, making them prime targets for malicious cyber actors.”