Manchester-based past SkilledUp Life tech startup customer Cytix raises £1.6 million Seed investment from Manchester-based Praetura Ventures founded by David Foreman and investment managed by Michael Rees.

In this case, the Limited Partner (LP) is Northern Powerhouse Fund II operated by British Business Bank with investment managed by Simon Cunnington.

SkilledUp Life helped Thomas Ballin and the team during the earliest stages of the tech startup when they were self-funding and bootstrapping. I also had the pleasure of mingling with Ben Armstrong at Techcelerate events when they were just getting started and trying to build the product’s first version.

According to Thomas,

Cytix is the first truly continuous security testing platform, focused on identifying change and using it to intelligently determine when to test. Whether it’s a developer making a pull request, threat intelligence about a new vulnerability, or a new server being deployed, we take feeds of data from across your technology stack and use this as telemetry to determine what has changed and what actions need to be taken to assess the impact that this has had on security.

Simply connect us to your existing workflows through our list of pre-built integrations or leverage the suite of native tools within our platform. We bridge the gap between automation and manual testing by identifying what actions are needed at any time and carrying them out as a sequence of tasks. Through this, we are able to minimise the time between vulnerabilities being introduced and being identified, and provide the information you need in order to resolve them as efficiently as possible.

We support applications, APIs, cloud-native services, and traditional infrastructure, providing you with a centralised platform from which to build a continuous security testing programme. We are CREST-accredited and our product can either be used to drive an internal security testing programme, or as a fully managed service. Watch as your entire security testing programme runs automatically.

Both Ben and Thomas stood up as a strong pair of co-founders. They came from the same industry, worked for the same boss and knew the market inside out. They knew how to innovate the market and slice a portion of the market for themselves.

They also had a superb unfair advantage in addition to the above. The pair was perfect for starting a tech product company. Let me explain why.

When you talk about building tech startups, especially at the very earliest stages, you need two people:

• Someone who can code and build – Thomas Ballin
• Someone who can sell – Ben Armstrong

Having been in the tech startup world for 20 years, I rarely see this ideal combination. I knew they would go places. And they had. A massive congratulations from me to Thomas, Ben and the team. My only regret was I could not convince them to join Techcelerate. 😁

• Read the story of their successful fundraiser covered by Deal Lite.
• Read the story about Pre-Seed round

I look forward to reading the story about Series A investment in the near future. Congrats all. Today is a good day for Manchester, SkilledUp Life and tech startups 🥂

Here is a bunch of Manchester tech startups leveraging SkilledUp Life as they self-fund and bootstrap their businesses in the early stages. These companies are cash-efficient and understand how hard the journey is:

• Dustid is run by Michael Livingstone.
• Orakly is run by Craig Taylor who is also a Techcelerate member
• mutuals is run by Eddy Davies.

Cytix used SkilledUp Life Volunteers for 20 months just after setting up the company. We look forward to helping more tech startups de-risk their business for investment if that’s the route they wish to take.

Written by Manoj Ranaweera, Founder & CEO of SkilledUp Life