Your startup in one sentence?
AlpenShield empowers human defenders. In other words, we enable our customers' IT experts to carry out their IT security operations themselves very easily and efficiently using Microsoft Sentinel – through the AlpenShield app.

How did your business idea come about?
We worked together for almost five years at a large American provider that had a very narrow focus and realized what huge market potential lay untapped. After conducting several customer interviews and building an MVP with very good customer feedback, we decided to go all in.

How big is your team, who is in it, and how did you find each other?
We currently have five permanent employees (unfortunately all men) who are all experts in their field – we are scattered across the globe: Germany, Austria, Ukraine, Great Britain, and India. We all knew each other from working together previously. We also have a team of excellent external developers and marketing experts who work with us on a permanent basis and are part of our extended team.

Who benefits from your product/solution and why?
End customers benefit because we make the extremely powerful Microsoft Sentinel solution very easily accessible to them and save them a lot of time and money with our AlpenShield app. Our partners (resellers) benefit because they can finally offer their end customers a SOC/MDR service, but only need their existing employees and customer relationships to do so – we take care of the entire technical infrastructure, including operation.

What are your next steps? 
We are looking for additional partners in the DACH region and are currently expanding our newly launched AlpenShield CyberSecurity Academy, where we offer on-demand and live courses in the field of Microsoft security products and solutions.

Why are you convinced that you will be successful?
We had customer inquiries even before our limited liability company was founded—and we are very fortunate to be very well received on the market. With a little luck, we will already generate EUR 0.75 million in revenue in this (first real fiscal year)—with a SaaS product.

What have been your biggest successes and hurdles/low points so far?
It's fantastic that we were able to win A1 Telekom Austria AG as a customer within just a few months (as is the collaboration with the team there). We also managed to complete the ISO 27001:2022 certification in just five months – and won a very prestigious innovation award from the City of Vienna.
The biggest hurdles were finding development partners at the beginning who understood what we were trying to do and took us seriously – which was really difficult.

Why did you apply for the ATHENE Startup Award UP24@it-sa?
Honestly? Because we hope this will give our service a much wider reach.

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