A Manchester-headquartered cyber security company founded by professional hackers has secured $4m to fuel future growth.
The investment into CultureAI, which also has offices in London and Edinburgh, was led by Germany-based venture capital firm Senovo.
The seed round also saw participation from new investor Conviction alongside existing backer Passion Capital.
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Angel investors Paul Forster, the co-founder of Indeed, and Guntram Friede, head of marketing, EMEA Salesforce and MuleSoft, also joined the round.
CultureAI founder and chief executive James Moore said: "It's almost unheard of for professional hackers (known as penetration testers) to fail to gain access to an organisation, even if they have great security awareness training for employees.
"We successfully gain access to organisations' data and systems every time and it's almost always as a result of human behaviour or error.
"As an example, multi-factor authentication (MFA) is often touted as a key cyber defence – yet we find that an average of 32% of employees accept MFA authentication requests sent by attackers, essentially opening the door for them.
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"The traditional awareness training approach simply doesn't improve behaviours like this – hacking people is still too easy."
CultureAI will use the new funding to "supercharge its product roadmap" and is to "significantly expand" its commercial and technical teams in its Manchester city centre office.
Head of HR Molly Keeton added: "Manchester has become one of the worlds leading tech and cyber security hubs, we're excited to be building the team from such a strong local talent pool."
Mona Müller from Senovo said: "While cyber security threats are growing and employees remain one of the main targets for hackers, the human risk factor continues to be an unsolved problem for most organisations.
"With their fully automated approach to measure human cyber security risk and mitigate it through gamified, data-driven coaching CultureAI offers the first solution to create a truly secure cyber security culture.
"We're extremely excited to be working with James, Jon and the rest of the team to rethink human cyber security."