Indurex has raised €7M to grow software that keeps watch on the control and safety systems running oil and gas sites, power companies, utilities and factories. The round was led by Contrarian Ventures, a seed-stage investor in climate and energy technology based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
For Contrarian, the deal follows a change in how energy is supplied. Its founder and managing partner, Rokas Peciulaitis, said electrification is “putting more critical infrastructure online, and attacks on it are rising”. “Detection alone is no longer enough,” he added.
That is the gap the Amsterdam startup wants to fill, and it will spend the money on research and a bigger commercial team. Axeleo Capital, a venture firm in Lyon, France, and Curiosity, an Amsterdam investor in young artificial intelligence (AI) software companies, also joined. Sales will start in Europe and the Middle East, with the United States and Asia-Pacific to follow.
Looking Past The Network
Many industrial security tools watch the network, such as firewalls that inspect traffic coming in from remote substations and pump stations. Jalal Bouhdada, Indurex’s founder and chief executive, says cyber defences in these sectors have for too long “focused solely on the network”, and his company looks instead at “the engineering, process and safety signals” inside a site.
Those signals come from operational technology (OT), the machines and software that run physical processes. Indurex’s product, SafeGuard AI, reads the distributed control systems (DCS) that steer a plant and the safety instrumented systems (SIS) that shut a process down when it drifts outside safe limits. It also reads process historians, the databases that log plant readings over time, along with alarm tools and ordinary information technology (IT) security products.
From that data, AI agents flag anomalies and engineering changes that a person should review, the company says. Examples include an altered control set-up, a changed protection setting or a modified safety function. The platform can plug into other vendors’ OT security tools, ranks each issue by risk so teams know what to handle first, and writes compliance reports against industrial security and safety standards.
Indurex says its early customers range from mid-sized energy and manufacturing companies to large multinationals, though it has not named them. One, an unnamed head of OT operations at a global manufacturer, said the software has “significantly improved our ability to move from detection to action”. The research firm Gartner has also listed Indurex as a Cool Vendor in cyber-physical systems security, the field where software directly controls physical equipment.
Attacks And New Rules Raise The Stakes
Pressure on operators is growing. The SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training and research organisation, found in a survey that more than one in five industrial organisations reported a cyber incident hitting their control or OT systems in the year before its November 2025 report. About 40% of those incidents disrupted operations, and remote access was the main way attackers got in.
European regulators are adding to it. The European Union’s second Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) sets cybersecurity duties for 18 sectors, including energy, water and the manufacture of critical products. Medium-sized and large companies in those sectors must report serious incidents to national authorities, and their top management can be held to account when protections fall short.
Indurex says its customers have seen gains in meeting NIS2. It also points to the International Electrotechnical Commission’s IEC 62443 standards for industrial automation security and to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) rules for the power grid.
A Second Company For Its Founder
Bouhdada has been here before. He founded Applied Risk, an Amsterdam industrial cybersecurity firm set up in 2012 with clients in energy, utilities, manufacturing, mining and shipping, and was its chief executive when the Norwegian assurance group DNV agreed to buy it in 2021.
He started Indurex with Maarten Oosterink, its co-founder and chief operating officer, who said the aim was “to make the connected world safer by bridging the digital and physical”. The company came out of stealth in January, saying then that it had run without outside investors and was talking to venture firms and angels. Bouhdada now calls its approach “the missing layer” and says the new money lets Indurex take it to more operators.
Indurex now has €7M from Contrarian Ventures, Axeleo Capital and Curiosity, a founder with an earlier exit in the same industry, and a plan to sell first in Europe and the Middle East. Its customers are still unnamed, and the results it describes are its own.
As more plants and grids go online, Indurex is betting that operators will want to watch what changes inside their equipment, not just the traffic on their networks.
