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CyberCoach coaches people the digital judgment their job now demands, from spotting a scam to deciding what to trust an AI with. The industry it competes in still does this by tricking employees and scoring them. We refuse to.
dana.paredes@cultsecurity.com · Dana Paredes, Communications & Operations
About
Work changed faster than workplace training did. The industry that is supposed to prepare people for this instead sends them fake scam emails without warning, records who falls for it, and gives them a risk score. Peer-reviewed research says that does not change behavior and can make it worse.
CyberCoach does the opposite. It coaches people in a short chat where they know they are practicing: they work through a realistic situation in their own words and get an answer back straight away, inside the messaging app they already have open. What they practice depends on their role. Nobody is tricked, nobody is graded, and the company never sees how any individual answered.
It is also the first platform of its kind built for the person being trained rather than the department buying it. Employees choose training tone and difficulty, can skip what they already know by passing a skill test, and rate every interaction. Administrators see that average continuously, and it consistently stays above 4 out of 5.
Boilerplate
Short
CyberCoach builds the digital judgment employees need at work: spotting scams, using AI well, writing safer software, through short role-based coaching conversations in the chat apps they already use. Unlike the rest of the industry, it never tricks or scores the people it trains: practice is announced, and learning is anonymous and psychologically safe by design.
Long
CyberCoach is a Finnish-US company that builds the digital judgment modern work demands: recognizing scams, using AI tools well and writing safer software, through short role-based coaching conversations inside Microsoft Teams, Slack or a browser. It was founded on peer-reviewed evidence that the industry standard, sending staff fake scam emails without warning and scoring them when they fail, does not change behavior and can make it worse. CyberCoach practice is announced instead of deceptive, and it is built so employees cannot be profiled: only that someone completed their training is recorded, never how they answered. Organizations still get the proof of training and useful group-level analytics. CyberCoach was founded by Maria Bique, Teemu Turunen and Mikko Toivanen, and is backed by Butterfly Ventures, Futurice and Villagecape Ventures.
Facts
- Founded by
- Maria Bique (CEO), Teemu Turunen (CPO), Mikko Toivanen (CTO)
- Company
- A Finnish-US venture, born global. Consolidating under the CyberCoach brand as focus narrowed to the CyberCoach SaaS platform; earlier coverage and legal documents may carry the Cult Security name.
- Investors
- Butterfly Ventures, Futurice, Villagecape Ventures
- What it teaches
- Role-based digital judgment: scams and social engineering, working with AI, secure software development, in Microsoft Teams, Slack or a browser
- User rating
- Above 4 out of 5, collected after every interaction and shown continuously to administrators.
- Working week
- Four days, as one of our commitments to diversity and creativity
On the record
Three positions we hold, with the research behind them. Happy to discuss any of them, and to point you to the studies themselves:
- Fake phishing emails do not make anyone safer. Sending staff scam emails without warning is the most common form of security training in the world. Independent studies of more than 30,000 employees found it produces no lasting improvement, and that the people marched off to a training page after failing went on to click more scams, not fewer. The research
- Scoring employees this way is surveillance, and in Europe it is likely illegal. Keeping a record of which individuals fell for which fake email is profiling under EU privacy law, which employers may only do when it is genuinely necessary. Since the method does not work, it is hard to argue that it is. The legal analysis
- This whole industry answers to the wrong customer. Training is bought by security departments, so it is built to reassure them rather than to be any good for the millions of employees who have to sit through it. Nobody asks those employees what they thought. We ask after every session and show the score to the companies that buy us.
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Logos, product screenshots and founder photos are available on request.
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