8Layers raises €1 million pre-seed extension with Spain's banking giants to secure digital identities

8Layers, a Madrid-based cybersecurity company founded in 2024 by Daniel García Morán, Pedro Palao, Pablo Carretero, and Iago Salgado, has closed a €1 million extension of its pre-Seed round, bringing total funding to €2.5 million. The extension was led by Criteria Venture Tech — the venture arm of CriteriaCaixa, one of Spain's largest financial holding companies — and Bankinter. The company's platform has been commercially available since May 2026.

The identity threat that regulators have named

Three out of four founders previously helped build Devo, the Spanish DeepTech company that became a unicorn. That background matters because 8Layers is built on a reading of the threat landscape that practitioners, not theorists, would reach: credential-based attacks are now the leading entry vector for enterprise security incidents, and existing tooling is built to detect attacks after they start rather than to manage identity security posture before they do.

8Layers' platform integrates three functions that most enterprises currently buy separately: Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM), which maps and manages the state of an organisation's identities before an attack; Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), which identifies and responds to active identity-based threats in real time; and automated compliance with Spain's ENS national security framework, the EU's NIS2 directive, and ISO 27001. The platform launched commercially in May 2026.

"We have just launched the platform commercially, and we are very proud to welcome two strategic partners who know first-hand the problem we solve," said CEO Daniel García Morán. "Their entry is not just an investment: it is confirmation, from within the financial sector itself, that digital identity security is now a top-level priority."

Validation from within the problem

The investor choice is the most legible signal in this round. Criteria Venture Tech (CriteriaCaixa) and Bankinter are not technology-sector VCs hedging on a thesis. They are Spanish financial institutions that face daily credential-based attacks and increasing regulatory pressure on how they document and manage digital identity security. Their investment is a co-signature on the product's relevance, not an external endorsement.

This builds on a €1.5 million pre-Seed round closed in 2025. The €1 million extension brings the total to €2.5 million, with the new capital directed toward go-to-market execution and European commercialisation — accelerating a sales pipeline that the commercial launch has opened.

8Layers enters a European cybersecurity sector that has received sustained investor attention in 2026: Wultra raised €6.8 million for post-quantum authentication and digital identity wallets; NeuralTrust closed €17.2 million to secure enterprise AI agents; MokN raised €12.9 million against credential theft. The difference in 8Layers' position is the regulatory integration — ENS, NIS2, ISO 27001 in a single automated compliance layer — and the financial-sector validation that two of Spain's largest institutions have just provided.