Telefónica Presented Tech Ventures, Investment Firm in Cybersecurity

Telefónica has presented Telefónica Tech Ventures, a new vehicle for investments in the cybersecurity field. It has been promoted by ElevenPaths, its cybersecurity company part of Telefónica Tech, and Telefónica Innovation Ventures (TIV), the company’s Corporate Venture Capital.

This new vehicle serves a dual purpose. Firstly, to develop Telefónica Tech’s own investment capabilities in the highly dynamic cybersecurity sector, which, according to some market estimates, will attract more than 8 billion dollars in investment around the world this year. Secondly, it will detect the most disruptive innovation in this field, thanks to a dedicated team of professionals from ElevenPaths and TIV.

Telefónica Tech Ventures starts with a group of nine invested cybersecurity startups selected from the portfolio of TIV and Wayra, Telefónica’s global open innovation hub. Over the next three years it also intends to invest in up to 15 startups, both early-stage and more mature ones, entering into series A, B and C and devoting the necessary resources to execute follow-ons in the best-performing startups.

The new investments will be geared towards startups with high disruptive potential in areas such as threat intelligence, cloud security, data protection and the application of automations and artificial intelligence in defence of any organisation, regardless of its size and the nature of the asset to be protected. The focus of the investments will be on the strategic markets for Telefónica and other significant technological markets, with an investment ticket of up to 6 million euros.

“Since we created ElevenPaths eight years ago we’ve remained close to the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the hacking community and this new vehicle will enable us to get even closer“, declared Chema Alonso, chief digital consumer officer at Telefónica and current chairman of ElevenPaths. “It will be an opportunity for them not only to have Telefónica as an investor but also to turn us into a customer or even a business partner, thus providing them with the chance to develop their projects around the world.“