Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois
Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois

When at the beginning of 2021 Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States, he immediately took decisive steps towards protecting his nation from hackers’ malicious activity in cyberspace. Addressing the issue of cybersecurity was on the top of the priority list for President Biden and his administration. The released Executive Order has centralized efforts to help identify, detect, and appropriately respond to dangerous and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. This national document serves as a manual all agencies look up to and moreover, it spreads an important message across: American people take the topic of cybersecurity seriously.

The threat of cyber attacks is not only hanging over the heads of governmental representatives who must be especially sensitive to national security matters but has also become a pressing concern for modern companies. The risk is tremendous. Accenture estimates that more than 40% of cyberattacks are aimed at small or medium businesses, but only 14% of them are prepared to defend themselves. Keeping in mind that cyberattacks now cost American companies roughly $200,000 on average, the aftermath of such incidents may be deadly: thousands of companies will be wiped out of the market with no possibility to recover.

Companies accept that uneven battle and, according to the maxim “prevention is better than cure”, invest large portions of their savings into proper cybersecurity measures and airtight, transparent compliance strategies. Unfortunately, despite being much needed, cybersecurity compliance is usually a headache for companies, as it is poorly structured, time-consuming and tedious.

To make the best of both worlds, Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois has emerged as a renowned name for addressing the cybersecurity queries of the business world. An expert in high-profile business development and deep learning techniques, Gaspard is an HEC Paris alumnus and an accomplished entrepreneur who has been navigating through the fintech world for a while now. His in-depth knowledge of financial institutions and tech companies gave him an excellent understanding of what these organizations wanted from cybersecurity compliance. In order to meet their needs, Gaspard co-founded a groundbreaking tool based on automation and artificial intelligence for simplified compliance processes. His company Skypher was welcomed with open arms both in France and the US and quickly attracted investors and Fortune 500 companies, including CMA CGM, an international leader in transport and logistics.

While at the beginning of their career most entrepreneurs are tormented by doubt regarding how their product will be received on the market, Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois had nothing to worry about. He perfectly knew that the topic of cybersecurity compliance needed restructuring and demystifying. From the perspective of big tech corporations, compliance processes were costly, overcomplicated and were treated as a necessary evil for keeping the company’s records safe. Small and medium B2B software companies, on the other hand, suffered from a shortage of security compliance solutions due to a lack of financial resources.

Their IT system is easier to understand, thus a large part of the traditional compliance work can be automated ” - highlights Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois.

The time for a change has come.

Compliance is complicated because the set of laws differs from state to state. Nevertheless, at the core cyber regulations focus on similar types of issues regardless of jurisdiction. They tend to have similar objectives, which include using a risk-based approach to understand the cybersecurity threats and implementing correct programs to fight against them, monitoring information systems, and periodically testing the cybersecurity efficiency. Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois notices, however, that all these tasks combined are endless and disrupting to everyday work of the company, hence managers and employees tend to postpone or omit cybersecurity-related activities.

If cybersecurity shall be effective - it must be simplified ” - he explains - “ Let’s take a B2B software company. Every time they want to sell their product to a client, they are asked to fill out a 500-question long security questionnaire or present expensive security certifications. In both cases, the process takes weeks or months and is really painful.

The answer is automation. The tool developed by Gaspard uses NLP and text recognition algorithms similar to those used for fraud detection by Google or Amazon. Algorithms automate the response to security questions without human assistance, which results in 10x faster completion of the forms and secure sharing of the files with clients and other interested parties.

“This is a very complex technical challenge at the forefront of research in Artificial Intelligence all over the world. We apply these algorithms to our use case of cybersecurity and do a lot of training on proprietary data.” - Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois notes.

They say success has many fathers. The story of Gaspard de Lacroix-Vaubois wouldn’t have been the same without great determination, flawless education and hard work. On top of that full immersion in the Y-Combinator winter 2020 batch, the famous Silicon Valley entrepreneurial program equipped Gaspard with everything a young entrepreneur can dream of: know-how, funding and connections. Until this day Gaspard is thankful for the experience that opened many doors for Skypher.

"When you say you've been to Y-Combinator, you have more credibility with your clients" - he observes - “In France, Skypher is also supported by Agoranov, a deeptech incubator known for its flair.”