Your startup in one sentence?

With SOC Guru, AlpenShield enables IT service providers to offer a SOC service based on Microsoft Sentinel with the same team.

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 all knew each other from working together previously. We also have a team of excellent external developers and marketing experts who work for us full-time and support us on an ongoing basis, making them part of our extended team.

Who profits from your product/your solution, and why?

IT service providers benefit from our SaaS solution because they can finally offer their 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 operations. So instead of simply reselling a license at a small markup, the MSP has real added value, higher margins, and greater customer loyalty.

What are your next steps?

We are looking for additional partners in Germany and Austria to expand our footprint. We are also launching a new version of our SOC Guru app at it-sa, which will enable us to offer lots of cool features in a short space of time. So stay tuned!

Why are you convinced that you will be successful?

We had customer inquiries even before our GmbH was founded—and we are very fortunate to be very well received on the market. In our first fiscal year, we had more than half a million in revenue from SaaS alone, and we will significantly exceed that in 2025, with growth of 30-40%.

What have been the 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 great 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 UP25@it-sa?

Honestly? Because we hope this will give our service a much wider reach.

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