Eindhoven-based security startup Sandgrain has raised 13.5 million euros in a Series A funding round. The investment will accelerate global expansion of its Cyberrock solution, which delivers advanced security for IoT devices, focusing on key sectors such as industrial, critical infrastructure and aerospace & defense. The round was led by Innovation Industries, with participation from the Brabant Development Agency (BOM), Invest-NL and existing investor DeeptechXL.
New regulations like the EU Cyber Resilience Act and the NIS2 Directive are raising standards for device security, while emerging quantum computing threats challenge traditional certificate-based methods. According to Sandgrain, Cyberrock addresses these challenges by providing hardware-grade post-quantum-resilient IoT security. A symmetrical challenge-response authentication scheme verifies device identity using an immutable and globally unique ID built into each device, linked to an enclave holding the corresponding secret keys. A secure cloud platform manages real-time identity and authentication of devices.
Founded in 2019 by industry veterans, Sandgrain builds on an idea once co-conceived by Mapper. It uses a unique combination of manufacturing technologies to hard-code the identity of a chip so that it can never be altered. Each Sandgrain chip is physically unique and 1043 physically unique chips can be produced – more than there are grains of sand on the entire earth.
“Sandgrain solves a large challenge in IoT: making strong security economical at the end-node,” says Rogier Ketelaars, investment manager at Innovation Industries. “By avoiding certificates and with a simple pre-provisioned unique root-of-trust, device authentication becomes simpler and cost-efficient. Their solution is easy to deploy today and designed with post-quantum resilience in mind, giving customers confidence in their security tomorrow.”
