Netsec raises €8.9M to bring AI-native managed cybersecurity to European SMEs

Netsec (legal entity: Barbican SAS, Paris) has raised €8.9 million (~$10M) in its first institutional round, led by Partech, with Primo Capital, View Different, Kima Ventures, Everywhere Ventures, Ithaca Investments, Vento, and angel investor Riccardo Zacconi (King, Candy Crush) participating. The stage is unstated; the company was founded in 2025 by Gianluca Varisco (CEO) and Guglielmo Reina (CTO).

The SME security gap

Enterprise cybersecurity has a distribution problem. The platforms best equipped to defend organisations — CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, SentinelOne — are built for procurement teams, procurement budgets, and the security operations centres that large companies maintain in-house. For the European SME, none of those conditions apply: no dedicated security team, no six-figure software budget, and rarely a CISO.

What exists in their place is a patchwork: firewall appliances from the IT reseller, antivirus tools from the laptop OEM, and manual compliance checklists for regulators. Netsec proposes to replace that patchwork with an AI-native managed security layer — automated threat detection across endpoints and network traffic, automated incident response that contains threats before human eyes arrive, and compliance reporting that maps automatically to NIS2 and other relevant frameworks.

Partech's bet and the regulatory tailwind

Partech has backed Flease in circular mobility and Rayon in design software — Netsec is the firm's most direct early-stage cybersecurity bet in the French market. The Partech lead does two things for Netsec: it provides the commercial credibility that helps enterprise prospects take a one-year-old vendor seriously, and it connects the company to Partech's portfolio network for channel partnerships.

The regulatory context is not incidental. NIS2, which took effect across EU member states in October 2024, has pushed SMEs to assess their security posture for the first time — both because they now bear direct obligations and because they are increasingly required to evidence compliance by the larger enterprises in their supply chains. DORA's SME implications for financial sector suppliers add another procurement trigger. "SMEs are massively underserved by cybersecurity," said Varisco. "We're building the managed-security layer that was only available to large enterprises."

What this round funds

Product development and go-to-market are the stated uses. In practice, this means completing the automated response capabilities (detection alone is well-trodden territory; response automation at the SME price point is the harder and more defensible problem), hiring engineering capacity in Paris, and building a sales team that can navigate the EU SME market at volume.

The angel roster — Riccardo Zacconi (King), the founder of Candy Crush — adds consumer-tech distribution thinking to a B2B security play. It is an unusual combination, though less puzzling once you note that Zacconi's most relevant attribute here is European gaming platform relationships — potential SME customers at scale.