Germany-based startup QuoIntelligence provides cutting-edge threat intelligence solutions, empowering organizations worldwide against evolving risks. A member of the EIC Scaling Club’s Digital Security & Trust group, QuoIntelligence leverages advanced AI and human expertise to deliver actionable, predictive intelligence.
We spoke with QuoIntelligence’s CEO and founder, Marco Riccardi, who has almost two decades of experience in cybersecurity across Europe. Marco is very proud of his talented team of analysts and engineers. Upon starting his company, he invited a former colleague Odín Rodríguez Lago, to join as its CTO and oversee infrastructure, data, application, and R&D teams. In 2022, Chief People Officer (now COO) Antonio Arias Lopez joined the company. He's now responsible for administrative operations and fundraising.
Marco says that “every day is a challenge in the startup world”, but his company is successful in overcoming each hurdle step by step. The first big challenge came sooner than expected – just three weeks after the company was born, the Covid-19 pandemic started. Today, Marco sees the positive outcome of this turn of events:
“Building a remote company from the ground up is way easier than transitioning an existing on-site workforce to full remote mode. Being born remote gives us the tools and flexibility that ensure high efficiency – in operating, delivering, and hiring. Still today, we remain fully remote.”
Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic did the cybersecurity industry an unexpected favor. The increased reliance on remote work and digital services exposed technological vulnerabilities on a massive scale, resulting in unprecedented growth.
The second challenge for Marco personally was switching from the analyst and team leader mindset to the entrepreneur mindset. Despite a business-minded family, he lacked formal education in economics or business development. He had to quickly learn sales, marketing, and finance, and apply his research skills to adapt to the business world.
The third big challenge for QuoIntelligence was pushing the market with their solution and scaling. Marco shares the team’s struggle with their first product:
“Our minimum viable product resembled a tricycle with two and a half wheels that’s somehow rolling down the hill. Nevertheless, it worked – and we were steadily improving it and delivering it to clients. Once we had more resources, we rebuilt our solution and created a new product. Within a year and a half, we'd replaced the old version without creating any inconveniences for our clients.”
With time, QuoIntelligence’s team discovered that their core competency lies in processing vast amounts of data. “To generate actionable intelligence, we need to efficiently collect, process, and analyze massive datasets. This requires substantial computational power and cloud infrastructure, all while adhering to stringent data privacy regulations like GDPR.”
Prior to QuoIntelligence, the EU market lacked a dedicated threat intelligence provider with a holistic approach, covering the needs of both small-medium and large enterprise markets. As demand grew for automated, user-friendly threat insights, the company's mission became clear: to make advanced threat intelligence accessible to all.
“Before, threat intelligence was something that only Fortune 500 companies could afford. We want to remove this barrier by making our technology affordable for any small and medium enterprise. We want to democratize the use of threat intelligence across all companies worldwide. That’s our unique selling proposition. ”
QuoIntelligence has rapidly emerged as a leading force in the threat intelligence landscape. A pivotal moment came with the successful completion of the TIBER-DE exercise, establishing QuoIntelligence as a trusted partner for cybersecurity in the German financial sector. The exercise ran for 14 months and gave the company significant visibility.
This early success was followed by recognition from industry giants, including Gartner, which named QuoIntelligence a Representative Vendor in its 2021 “Market Guide for Security Threat Intelligence Products and Services” report. This indicated that already after their first year QuoIntelligence was moving in the right direction.
“It’s a major achievement that we were able to develop so fast and match our competition that was 10 if not 15 years ahead of us.”
The company's rapid ascent has attracted significant investor interest, culminating in a successful €5 million seed funding round led by DeepTech VC investor, eCAPITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTNERS last year.
Finally, Marco views QuoIntelligence's nomination to the EIC Scaling Club as a significant milestone. Membership in this exclusive group gives the team invaluable access to experienced entrepreneurs and industry leaders. A firm believer in the power of networking, Marco is eager to learn from both mentors and peers, sharing insights and learning about the challenges and achievements of others.
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.
Subscribe to our newsletter here to stay up-to-date!