Xiphera’s first financing round was led by anchor investor Gorilla Capital, which was joined by two other institutional investors — Korpun Seed Ltd from SijoittajaPRO Corporate Finance and Ääkköset Oy — as the three main investors. Additional individual investors also joined the late seed financing round totalling 480k€.
Xiphera is a bootstrapped company and it has focused on organic and profitable growth during its entire history. However, there are times in a company’s journey when external investment enables strategic and proactive activities, and with the successfully completed financing round Xiphera will be able to speed up its transition from a startup company into a scaleup company.
Late seed financing rounds are typically targeted for companies which have demonstrated customer traction and plan to continue and accelerate their growth. Xiphera being a five-year-old, cash-flow positive company with full ownership by its Co-Founders until 2022 is an ideal target for late seed financing, and the external investment will be used to generate business growth and further international expansion.
“The external investors will also bring their considerable expertise and business acumen to our company”, says Xiphera’s CEO and Co-Founder Matti Tommiska, “The successfully completed financing round combined with Xiphera’s recently announced admission into Business Finland’s Young Innovative Companies (NIY) Program admission into Business Finland’s Young Innovative Companies (NIY) Program will give us the tools to accelerate our international growth. I am absolutely confident that we will be the leading provider of secure and high performance cryptographic Intellectual Property cores for FPGAs and ASICs.”
Xiphera’s main investors
Scaleup companies benefit greatly from the right network and supporting connections for their business to grow and succeed. Xiphera’s three main investors, Gorilla Capital, Korpun Seed Ltd, and Ääkköset Oy, will support Xiphera’s expansion and business development in multiple ways. The following quotes summarise the driving motives of Xiphera’s main investors, with the common themes being a passionate team, solving real-world customer problems both today and in the future, and demonstrated traction.
“Despite being founded by PhDs and developing something fairly complex and deep tech, Xiphera is not a science project. It addresses a genuine business problem — which is only boosted during these turbulent times — and the founders demonstrate a healthy commercial attitude. We like founders who have a passion for the customer problem and felt strong alignment with Xiphera. We’re excited to be part of the next leg of Xiphera’s journey” — Risto Rautakorpi, Gorilla Capital.
“Cybersecurity is a big megatrend and we are proud to solve these problems together with Xiphera. Xiphera has a unique team with deep knowledge in the hardware-based security solutions. We love companies that have the ability to grow profitably without external funding in the first years of the company’s journey. One of the big rules of investing is “Don’t invest in something you don’t understand”. We proudly announce that we have no deep understanding about cybersecurity, but we trust the team of Xiphera and that is why we invest” — Matias Itkonen, SijoittajaPRO Corporate Finance / Korpun Seed Ltd.
“Nobody can ignore data protection and privacy. All businesses need to safe-guard intellectual property and proprietary data, such as their AI models and customer secrets. Cryptography is a key component in this and it has to be blazing fast, local and trustworthy. By investing in Xiphera we are investing in the trends of privacy protection, Zero Trust, edge computing and safe ML/AI. Above all, we are investing in a great team that can handle even the post-quantum concerns on a global scale.” — Ääkköset Oy.
Company introductions
Xiphera
Xiphera Ltd. is a Finnish company designing hardware-based security solutions using proven cryptographic algorithms. We have strong cryptographic expertise, extensive experience in system design, and deep knowledge on digital logic, enabling our customers to protect their critical information and assets.
Gorilla Capital
Gorilla Capital is a Nordic VC fund based in Finland investing in early-stage companies that apply technology to solve real business problems of today. Our focus is on camels rather than unicorns – we don’t bet on catching the black swan outlier, instead our model is built on statistical probabilities based on real life evidence.
Our purpose is to enable each of our portfolio companies to reach their maximal potential – be it a billion-euro IPO or an early stage trade sale acquisition. We look for talented, hard-working, and passionate teams applying technology to solve tangible business problems evident today. We like to see the customer, rather than the product or technology, as the driving force of the actions of the entrepreneur.
Post-investment, we provide our companies with guidance on key strategic topics, best practices from our portfolio as well as advise them in understanding what is required to achieve an exit. We want to be kept up-to-date with the companies’ businesses regularly but we don’t mandate on having a seat on their board. We’re an active investor with 20-25 new investments annually.
Korpun Seed Ltd from SijoittajaPRO Corporate Finance
SijoittajaPRO Corporate Finance is a consortium of Finnish entrepreneurs, family businesses, and professional investors, investing in Finnish growth companies. We have invested over €72 million into 90 different companies during the past 6 years.
The early stage seed investment company Korpun Seed Ltd, started in 2022 by SijoittajaPRO Corporate Finance, co-invests in early-stage Finnish growth companies, with Xiphera being our fourth investment.
Ääkköset Oy
Ääkköset Oy – We invest in inspiring innovations driven by true entrepreneurs. Let’s accelerate the productization to make a global impact.
