The Estonian cyber security startup Phishbite is aiming to enter neighbouring markets

Tehnopol is part of the joint Northbound Scaleups (NBSCALE) project, which helps companies expand into new markets. The Estonian startup Phishbite went to visit Poland to look at possible target markets.

The goal was to meet at least five possible partners. “Making contacts was quite time-consuming and it was quite difficult to get through to the right people by telephone from here. The meetings we held went well, and we also managed to organise a couple of extra ones on the spot as well as those we had agreed in advance”, said co-founder of Phishbite Urmo Keskel.

They have now signed a contract with one partner, and are negotiating with a couple more. Keskel noted that although the first steps have been made, there is still a lot of work to do.

“The meetings we had showed that even though you can do a lot in online meetings, they are no substitute for real meetings in person. The contacts that you make when you meet people face-to-face are much stronger and they make things move much faster”, he said.

As well as meeting possible partners to work with, the company visited the Estonian Embassy in Warsaw. “That was a very good experience for us and we got a lot of good advice there about who else to speak to, and an invitation to a local startup event that happened the next evening”.

Why Poland?

Poland was chosen as a target market for several reasons, the first of which is that it is a very big market with a population of 38 million. The Polish state is investing quite a lot in raising awareness in society about cyber security and the indexes for cyber security show that both Poland and Estonia are at a similarly very high level, as Poland is in second place on the National Cyber Security Index and Estonia is in fifth. Urmo Keskel said that this makes things easier for them because they do not have to work so hard to raise general awareness.

The Polish economy is growing fast, and Keskel noted that Warsaw is becoming the new technology centre of Eastern Europe, where a great number of international financial and technology companies are opening their new centres.

“Poland is also attractive because fewer of our competitors offer support for the Polish language, which they do for the languages used more broadly in Europe”, he noted. The company also found that it is quite easy for Estonians to do business with Poles. “They are very pragmatic and precise, just like us. It seems that the war in Europe has brought us much closer to the Poles and we felt that we were warmly welcomed there as brothers”, Keskel said.

He explained that their biggest international competitors are not very active in the Polish market, though there are some local companies that offer similar services. “Our advantage is that our service is very easy to introduce and is highly autonomous, so it does not need constant tuning and maintenance because using AI lets us automatically adapt the phishing emails we send out to match the profile of the business and the employee”, he added.

Some alterations would however be needed for the Polish market. It is important for Phishbite that their phishing emails take account of the local context in the same way that scam emails do now. The phishing emails sent out in the name of Omniva and LHV that are common in Estonia are already quite well written, and local brands and the local language need to be used in the same way in other markets too. “We use large language models to create our phishing emails, and so it is quite easy to make the changes that we need in order to adapt our products for different markets”, said Keskel.

Plans for the near future

Phishbite is planning to have monthly turnover of 30,000 euros by the end of the year and the target for total turnover for the year is 240,000 euros. Foreign markets that it is looking at alongside Poland are Czech Republic, Latvia and Lithuania. “We are using the agent model for sales in Latvia and Lithuania, and in Poland and Czechia we have local sales partners. If we can reach 25% of our turnover this year coming from outside Estonia, we can be very happy with our progress into new markets”, said Keskel.

A new product that Phishbite will soon be releasing is a self-service portal that gives clients phishing tests made with even more transparency and shows them what they should focus on even more. The phishing tests and training materials are being constantly updated, and from the end of the year clients will be offered not only phishing tests but also training on general cyber hygiene.

“Our approach is to train staff with bite-sized short courses, so that they do not get given too much information all in one go, and each training session can focus on one particular topic. Each online session takes about 10 minutes, and ends with a test of understanding. During the course of a year we can cover all the main topics of cyber hygiene in this way”, said Keskel.

Northbound Scaleups (NBSCALE) is a joint project run by Tehnopol, the Turku Science Park in Finland and Movexum in Sweden to help companies expand into new markets.