Europe's Digital Security & Trust market roadmap: Securing growth

EIC Scaling Club has released a new market roadmap for the Digital Security & Trust sector.

As cyber threats continue to evolve and intensify, Europe is positioning itself as a key player in the digital security landscape. The new market roadmap highlights both the opportunities and challenges facing European companies in this critical sector.

The report emphasizes that the market requires specialization and differentiation to retain cost and convenience competitiveness. As Nuno Loureiro, Co-founder & CEO of Probely, points out: "Specialization is highly valued by the market as it drives expertise, quality, differentiation, innovation, efficiency, and growth."

Key insights from the roadmap include:

1. Sales industries remain focused around B2B financial, professional, and logistic services, with an increasing interest in the public sector.
2. Geographically, companies are shifting their focus from national markets to expansion within the EU and US, while China remains a low target.
3. The B2B customer channel remains dominant, with a growing interest in tapping into indirect sales support in the future.
4. Major risks and challenges are seen in growing customers, securing investments, and maintaining competitive advantage.
5. Competition is primarily coming from the USA and other well-funded scaleups.
6. Funding opportunities are diversified across VC/PE, public grants, project revenues, and debt funding.

The report also highlights several challenges facing the sector. European regulations, while often perceived as presenting more pain points than advantages, are opening new strategic entry points. Additionally, the complexity and competitiveness of the sector make it difficult for customers to navigate competing solutions, emphasizing the need for companies to perfect their key differentiators.

Talent acquisition and retention, particularly in sales leadership, is identified as a critical success factor for scaling. As Michal Tresner, CEO & Co-founder of ThreatMark, notes: "Finding and retaining great Sales leaders who want to join a startup (and know how one works) is very hard but a critical success factor. Leadership is key in scaling."

Despite these challenges, the Digital Security & Trust sector in Europe shows significant promise. By focusing on specialization, strategic expansion, and addressing key market needs, European companies can solidify their position in this crucial and rapidly evolving industry.

The 12 European scale-ups selected by EIC Scaling Club in this sector are already well-positioned to focus on the highlighted areas, having raised over EUR 200M to date and representing every corner of Europe – the report reflects their current priorities and challenges paired with the insights of the people who will mentor and assist them on realizing their ambitions and potential. 

For more hard data and stakeholder insights, read the full market roadmap report here: https://eicscalingclub.eu/club-reports 

Market roadmaps are reports that provide a snapshot of the stakeholder members vision and insights on the state of the respective market in Europe. They are designed to help professionals and entrepreneurs in particular to grasp meaningful insights to build their scaling strategy.

You can find all EIC Scaling Club reports here: https://eicscalingclub.eu/club-reports

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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