MokN raises €12.9M Series A — and lands GV's first cheque into a French startup

French cybersecurity startup MokN has raised a €12.9 million ($15 million) Series A led by GV — Alphabet's venture arm — in what the firm marks as its first investment in a French startup. DataDog joined, as did existing backers Moonfire and OVNI Capital, eight months after MokN's €2.6 million seed.

Turning the phishing around

Most security tools try to keep attackers out. MokN's first product, Baits, assumes they will get in — and turns their own playbook against them. It deploys ultra-realistic decoy access points, fake VPN and webmail portals, that lure credential thieves into "logging in." When they do, they hand over the stolen credentials they are trying to use, which MokN can then flag and neutralise before the real damage is done. The company calls the approach "phish-back."

It appears to be working at scale. MokN says it now protects more than a million users across large corporations and mid-size firms, including Fortune Global 500 companies, with teams in Paris and New York. Founded in 2024 by Gautier Bugeon (CEO), Antoine Coudoux, Alexis Georges and Adrien Casteleiro, it is using the Series A to widen that footprint.

From a product to a category

The more ambitious part of the plan is conceptual. Bugeon frames the raise as the start of "Active Identity Recovery" — extending the proactive, counter-attacking logic of Baits from stolen passwords to every form of digital identity, with the stated aim of turning it into a new global standard.

That is a large claim for a Series A company, and it is the kind of claim a tier-one US fund's first French cheque tends to amplify. The capital funds platform build-out, growth in France and the US, a UK expansion, and the R&D needed to turn one clever product into the category MokN says it can own.