From a fireside chat between Passbolt CEO Kevin Muller and Judith Schleder to the presentation of the Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity’s new LUCYA programme to highlights from the country’s startup ecosystem, Silicon Luxembourg’s Startup Apéro had plenty on the agenda for cybersecurity experts and enthusiasts.
Cybersecurity is a major challenge for companies and institutions – and the landscape is evolving rapidly. Partly thanks to the explosion of AI technologies, cyberattacks have increased by 100-fold over the last two years, said Kevin Muller, CEO and founder of the password management platform Passbolt, who participated in a fireside chat at Silicon Luxembourg’s Startup Apéro Tuesday evening.
There’s an “asymmetry” between offensive attacks and defensive moves, he explained. Offence is cheap; defence is expensive. The quality and complexity of attacks have increased, but the teams responsible for defence have not been scaled up in a manner proportional to the number of cyberattacks, making it difficult to resist – and making B2B solutions like the one offered by Passbolt even more important.
Born in the early-2000s in India, where Muller was working at a digital agency, Passbolt has been established in Luxembourg since 2016. “It’s like a toolkit, not only for passwords, but for credential management,” said Muller. The platform is collaborative and unifies several functionalities, allowing it to serve many teams within the same company: the individual user who needs a simple way to manage complex and hard-to-guess passwords; the “hard-core technical team” that manages “privileged accesses” – secrets that can compromise the entire company; and the DevOps team, who rarely uses human interfaces, but rather enables two machines to talk to each other.
Another crucial aspect is “data ownership.” End customers can download the Passbolt source code, install it behind their own firewall on their own servers, and control everything, allowing companies to keep their credentials “close to their chest.”
This versatility has helped to drive Passbolt’s success story and makes it stand out from its competitors. Instead of offering a hyper-specific solution, its platform exists “in the middle” and suitable for all types of users. But its versatility also extends to the sectors that now employ Passbolt’s open-source platform, which range from the hospitality and defence industries to healthcare and government institutions.
Customer feedback is key, noted Muller. As the platform is “fully community-driven” – Passbolt runs on a “freemium” model, meaning that many users use the free version, whilst some companies pay for advanced functionalities – it’s important to listen to “signals” that guide the company’s development of additional features.
Be resilient
Passbolt in January 2025 announced an $8 million series A funding round to help grow its team and speed up the delivery of new features. As a company grows, said Muller, the environment gets more “noisy,” making it essential to carefully select priorities and ensure that everything is aligned with the growth plan. “This is something that doesn’t come easy,” he added. “Your job as founder is to shut all of this [noise] out and find the one thing where you’ll have the biggest impact.”
The “overnight success stories” rampant on social media, Muller cautioned, won’t happen 99.99% of the time. Building a successful company will likely take years, he said. His advice for startups? “Be ready for that, be durable, and be ready to do the same thing for a very long time. And because you’ll have to do the same thing for a very long time, make sure you’re in love with what you’re building. Otherwise, it’s not going to work.”
Presentation of LUCYA
The Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity has something that could help startups on their journey: the freshly launched programme called LUCYA to support startups and foster innovation. LUCYA aims to provide startups with market awareness, visibility, and contact with corporates and investors, explained Davide Tremolada, startup & ecosystem manager at the Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity. It also plans to raise awareness around cybersecurity more broadly – on both the business and technical sides – and is searching for partners to bring startups to a wider audience. Four startups active in Luxembourg – PanIAM, CyberExM, MON5, and CloudSoul – were already on hand Tuesday evening to pitch their cybersecurity solutions to the crowd.
“We want to support the startups to scale in Luxembourg and abroad,” said Tremolada. “We want to deliver good, reliable products to the market. I think that’s one of the important points of this programme,” he added, describing LUCYA as more of a “facilitator” rather than an “accelerator.” The programme is free; startups do not have to pay to participate, but they do not receive any funding either. “For now, we don’t have a huge number enrolled in the programme, as we are just starting, but they are arriving – and they’re asking the House of Cybersecurity to help them enter the country and get established here.”
The Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity is also setting up a cybersecurity “factory,” which will provide open cybersecurity data that can be used by companies to improve and train their systems. There will be, later on, a connection with the LUCYA programme as well, as startups’ access to the factory will be facilitated, said Tremolada.
Currently, the teams of the LUCYA programme and the cybersecurity factory are small, but there are plans to expand both the LUCYA and factory teams, said Tremolada. “There’s a lot going on now.”
Sustained growth in the ecosystem
Events like Silicon Startup Apéro are a testament to the liveliness of the cybersecurity startup scene. Tremolada noted that he appreciated the “inspiring” fireside chat, as well as the interaction and engagement from the audience.
And there are concrete figures to back up this lively scene. The grand duchy saw roughly 58 startups in Luxembourg in 2025, bringing the total number of startups active in Luxembourg to over 800, said Orkun Özbatur, manager of startup relations at Luxinnovation. Enterprise software, fintech, and health are the most-represented sectors, though energy, transport, and space are also growing sectors. About half (55%) of the companies created last year leverage AI, reflecting the increased focus on this strategic pillar of the economy.
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