🥷 Backing Lupin & Holmes

Hi, it’s Alex from 20VC. I’m investing in seed & series A European vertical solutions (vSol) which are industry specific solutions aiming to become industry OS and combining dynamics from SaaS, marketplaces and fintechs. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and vSol. Today, I’m super excited to announce our latest investment in Lupin & Holmes.

At seed, our job is to back exceptional entrepreneurs. At 20VC, we do our best work when we can precisely articulate why.

With Roni, it’s very obvious:

• 23 years old

• Born & raised in Grenoble, far from Paris

• Started programming at 10

• Started hacking at 13

• Top player on Counter Strike at 14

• $800k made in bug bounty hacking top companies like Google, Amazon, Paypal & Netflix

• Joined the red-team of a French unicorn (ManoMano) at 18

• Did not go to university

• Exceptional storyteller

• Deep understanding & network in cyber

• Demonstrated ability to sell his product to top tech companies

Roni is building in software supply chain security. Its product called Depi plugs into a company’s code repos, maps all their software dependencies, continuously tries known real-world attack techniques to see how an attacker could break in and offers prioritised fixes to identified vulnerabilities.

For instance, when a critical flaw was discovered in Rollup, a JavaScript build tool with 60 million weekly installs, Depi alerted Ledger before its public disclosure, containing the risk before it reached production.

20VC is leading Roni’s $5.9m pre-seed round alongside our friends at Seedcamp, Kima and Purple as well as amazing angels from Wiz, HuggingFace & GitGuardian. We will use the funding to build the core team, expand the product from detection to remediation & accelerate US GTM.

Thanks to Julia! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you soon for another issue! 👋