Northern Gritstone, the life sciences and deeptech venture capital firm, has made a £3 million investment into Manchester-based cybersecurity start-up Cytix as part of a £5 million Series A round alongside Auriga Cyber Ventures and PXN’s managed NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance.
“Cytix’s mission is to tackle the problems created by rapid software change, a distinct risk for organisations today as AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, and continuous delivery outpace the governance of security models,” said Northern Gritstone.
“The funding will accelerate the roll out of the company’s newly launched change risk platform. The platform continuously monitors every software change or update that a business makes, analyses and validates the risk of that change, providing an explaination as to how that risk was handled.”
Many of Northern Gritstone’s portfolio companies are spinouts from the Northern Arc universities of Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield. The investment in Cytix marks Northern Gritstone’s 55th investment since it began investing over four years ago.
Ben Armstrong, CEO and Co-founder of Cytix said: “We chose Northern Gritstone for their conviction in investing in deeptech companies in the North of England with global ambition.
“AI-assisted development means change now happens at machine speed. Meanwhile, very few security leaders have control over, or an understanding of those changes from a risk perspective.
“Right now, existing tools can tell you what vulnerabilities you have, but they can’t tell you about the risk. We launched our change risk management platform to help get control of that risk”
Northern Gritstone added: “The platform sits between a customer’s software development lifecycle (SDLC) where change happens, and their risk, security and compliance functions where the change is evidenced for compliance purposes.
“It is the control point through which every software change passes: understanding what change occurred and the associated business risk, deciding the security action, validating the risk, and providing the evidence to show how it was handled.
“The Series A round will help Cytix reach customers in enterprise and regulated businesses where change governance is a regulatory obligation. Customers can access the platform either directly with Cytix or through its managed service partnerships with NCC Group and KPMG.”
Northern Gritstone CEO Duncan Johnson said: “The explosion of AI-assisted software development has led to a race to ensure software implementation remains secure.
“Cytix’s platform aims to help enterprises take a realistic approach, recognising where change carries the most risk whilst allowing businesses to innovate. Northern Gritstone is proud to support another ambitious Manchester-based business in an exciting phase of its growth.”