Cybersecurity scale-up Coro recently announced their $100M funding round, led by One Peak. This new funding will accelerate Coro’s mission to empower SMEs and their service providers with enterprise-grade solutions.

The One Peak team sat down with Co-Founder & CTO Carmel Domshlak and Co-Founder & CMO Dror Liwer to glean insight into what’s next for Coro and the broader cybersecurity industry.

Watch the video recording here or read the conversation transcript below (edited for clarity).

Carmel Domshlak, CTO & Co-Founder, Coro & Dror Liwer, CMO & Co-Founder, Coro

Meet Coro

Dror Liwer, CMO & Co-Founder: Coro is the only cybersecurity company that has made it a point to go and protect the mid-market and small businesses. We believe that a market that is generating 63% of the GDP should be protected and not as an afterthought.

Carmel Domshlak, CTO & Co-Founder: Yeah. And to explain what it means to build a cybersecurity solution to for the mid-market: it is much more about thinking of the user, thinking of the experience of regular folks, and companies that just want to do their business, and that focus turns things upside down.

You have to first think in terms of what your customers will be happy to do, and tailor the whole philosophy of the product towards that. So it’s not threats first. It is the operator first.

So we really want to make cybersecurity as easy and fun as a morning cup of coffee, and it is brewing very well.

The market opportunity

Dror Liwer, CMO & Co-Founder: I think that in every other aspect of software, somebody thought of the mid-market and the small businesses and created something specific for them, whether it’s CRM or ERP or productivity, or whatever.

For whatever reason in cybersecurity, nobody focused on that market. We thought that it’s inconceivable that a market segment that generates 63% of the GDP, 70% of employment, is treated this way. And we felt that there was an enormous opportunity to both grow a company extremely aggressively, while doing something that is actually a very good thing for the economy and for the people. So we feel very good about the work that we’re doing, not just from a business sense, but also in terms of our vision and mission.

Carmel Domshlak, CTO & Co-Founder: And when you think about small businesses — particularly in the US where our focus is — the likelihood of a of a small business to survive 10 years is very, very low. There are a lot of complexities along the way: economy, financing, trends, customers, everything. And eliminating reasons for which you should not fail is of high importance: reducing risk and allowing you to focus on your business.

Dror Liwer, CMO & Co-Founder: We conducted a survey just under a year ago in which we asked 1400 CEOs of mid-market and small companies how often they think of their business being under a cyber attack. 71% of them said either every single day or multiple times a day. To put things in perspective, when we asked the same question to a control group in the enterprise, this figure was only 63%.

And the reason is, when you are an enterprise, you have a stack of software that’s protecting you. You have a legal team. You have a red team, a black team. You have a crisis management team. You have a PR firm. You have legal. You have insurance. If there is an attack, you’re going to be okay. For a mid-market or a small business, to be attacked is such a disruption to their business that sometimes they never survive it. Our job is to make sure that they can focus on running their business successfully and growing it, and not on cybersecurity.

Carmel Domshlak, CTO & Co-Founder: I will add to that actually that it is not only about providing customer confidence, but it is also to enable these businesses. Because over the last few years, the requirements that the customers of this business, the loan providers of this business, the insurers of this business, and the government puts on these small businesses. And if you want to be part of a supply chain, you have to comply with regulations.

It is just too complicated, too expensive, and not accessible for most of these businesses. And I’m glad that we are coming to fill this hole, to fill this void.

What’s next?

Dror Liwer, CMO & Co-Founder: On the business side, another reason we’re very excited about joining with One Peak is we’re looking into a European expansion — EMEA really, but the first steps are going to be in Europe. And with the team’s help — and they’ve been extremely helpful so far — we plan to make our first moves into the European market this year and make a much bigger investment into that next year.

So that’s what’s next from a business perspective, but also generally the growth. We’ve grown 300% year-over-year for the last 4 years straight, and we plan to continue this trajectory with the help of our investing partners.

Carmel Domshlak, CTO & Co-Founder: And we will continue to improve the coffee we serve in the morning.

Dror Liwer, CMO & Co-Founder: Absolutely. He means the cybersecurity, of course.

Carmel Domshlak, CTO & Co-Founder: It is a never-ending road. We will always be improving. We will always be learning from our customers. We will always be discovering new things that can be improved in the system. But again, with our focus on the comfort, the confidence of the operator.

Learn more about Coro and continue to follow their incredible growth trajectory.