NATO-Trusted Startup Raises Millions to Spot Hybrid Threats Early

A Ukrainian-founded startup that helps NATO spot hybrid threats before they turn into attacks just raised fresh capital to take its early-warning technology beyond governments. Osavul, headquartered in Luxembourg, closed a Series A round of 8.5 million euros, led by cybersecurity investor 33N Ventures, with participation from Balnord, G+D Ventures and existing investor 42CAP, according to Tech.eu's reporting on the round. The financing, announced on October 1, 2026, brings the company's total funding to about 12 million euros.

Osavul's pitch is timing. Conventional security tools look for malicious activity already happening inside a network. The startup's AI platform instead scans online and open-source information for early signals of hybrid threats before an operation reaches that stage — disinformation campaigns, hostile chatter, and other traces of hostile intent across the cyber, physical and information domains. The company says its systems process more than one billion data points each month across more than 100 countries, and that its assessments are evidence-traced, reviewed by analysts, and able to run on-premise inside a customer's own sovereign infrastructure, as reported by SecurityWeek.

Born from an invasion

Osavul was founded in 2022, in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, by Dmytro Plieshakov and Dmytro Bilash. The two founders first applied their data-science experience to detecting disinformation, then widened the product into a platform for identifying hybrid threats spanning information operations, cyber activity, espionage and sabotage, according to Tech.eu. "We built Osavul under live operational conditions, and that experience travels," Bilash said. "From Luxembourg we now serve customers worldwide, increasingly in regions facing conflict and instability, where the need for sovereign, multi-language intelligence is most acute."

The backdrop is a Europe where hybrid threats arrive as a steady drumbeat of hostile activity. More than 150 state-linked incidents have been recorded across the continent since 2022, the company says, as adversaries blend cyberattacks, sabotage, espionage and information manipulation while hiding who is responsible. Most corporate security teams are built for either cyber or physical risk, not both — which is the gap Osavul is selling into. For more on how money is moving into security tech, see our business coverage, including the recent multibillion-dollar industrial software deal.

Why investors are buying early warning

The round's backers are betting that detecting hybrid threats early becomes its own enterprise security category. "Adversaries operate across information, cyber and physical channels at once; most security tools are still siloed," said Carlos Alberto Silva, managing partner at 33N Ventures. "We are backing these second-time founders to build the defining company in hybrid threat intelligence — from Europe, for the world." The founders previously sold a company called Captain Growth to Perion, according to SecurityWeek.

The traction numbers, all company-reported, are striking: government customers in 10 countries, including NATO, where Osavul is one of three technology companies delivering the alliance's Information Environment Assessment Capability. Contract revenue has increased fourfold over the past year, according to the company. The plan now is to use the new funding to deepen government and defense work while pushing its hybrid threats platform into businesses in critical industries — energy, airports, ports, transportation and finance — where geopolitical threats increasingly overlap with corporate security.

The bigger picture

There is a sovereignty thread running through the deal. Osavul's assessments can run on-premise within sovereign infrastructure, so sensitive data never leaves customer systems — a selling point for European governments and regulated industries that want to know where critical technology runs and who controls it. That concern has become a genuine funding theme: investors are increasingly backing technology partly because of where it is built and operated, not just what it does.

A note of caution is in order. The headline figures — a billion data points a month, the incident counts, the revenue growth — come from the company, not from independent audits, and predicting hybrid threats is probabilistic by nature: it can be wrong, and false alarms carry their own costs. But the direction of travel is clear. "Hybrid attacks are no longer a government problem alone," Plieshakov said. "The companies running energy, airports, ports, transport and finance now face the same adversaries, usually without the means to see them coming."

Why should that matter to anyone outside a security operations center? Because hybrid attacks land on ordinary life: a sabotaged cable can mean a blackout, a compromised port system can snarl supply chains, a disinformation wave can rattle an election. The bet Osavul's investors just made is that the companies societies rely on will pay for early warning on hybrid threats. Whether that view proves accurate — and affordable — is what the next two years of enterprise rollout will decide.