Insights

Cybersecurity in focus: how Oakley is approaching the opportunity

Oakley Capital

26.06.25

5 min read

Recent headlines about cyberattacks on UK retailers underscore the growing scale and frequency of cybercrime. As a result, businesses are rapidly ramping up their spending on cybersecurity. It's estimated that cyberattacks now cost companies over $10 trillion annually, prompting global cybersecurity spending to reach $240 billion per year—a figure expected to increase fivefold as the frequency and severity of attacks grows.

Compounding this is a global shortage of cybersecurity professionals. The high demand for talent has driven salaries up, making it increasingly difficult for businesses to hire in-house. Many are instead turning to specialist cybersecurity providers for protection.

These dynamics have made cybersecurity one of the most compelling investment sectors today, with significant interest in high-quality businesses. In this competitive landscape, capital alone is not enough—investors must bring added value.

At Oakley, we’ve spent years cultivating a deep network to identify and support the most attractive opportunities.

Committed nearly

€400m

into cybersecurity businesses in last 12 months

With over two decades of investing experience—including expertise in adjacent sectors like hosting—we’ve built a reputation as the partner of choice for founders. In the past 12 months alone, we’ve committed nearly €400 million across three founder-led cybersecurity businesses.

We’ve taken a disciplined approach to navigating this complex market, reviewing hundreds of opportunities to avoid common pitfalls, including:

Reducing our exposure to technology obsolescence risk: cyber security technology is advancing so quickly, software providers who may have an edge for now risk quickly becoming obsolete as ever more innovative software tools are launched. Oakley has mitigated this risk by focusing on service providers – who will typically deliver a service using an interchangeable range of best-in-class software tools - rather than on the software developers themselves.

Prioritising talent and culture: Given the fierce competition for skilled professionals, we place significant emphasis on company culture and staff retention as part of our due diligence.

Targeting fragmented markets: We’ve focused on fragmented segments—such as cybersecurity managed services—where there’s strong potential for value-accretive M&A.

This strategy has led us to invest in three exceptional businesses:

I-TRACING and Bridewell

Our first two investments—I-TRACING, the leading independent cybersecurity services provider in France, and Bridewell, a leader in the UK market—have both delivered over 30% compound annual growth in recent years.

Pure-play cybersecurity service providers of this scale are rare. By combining these two leaders, we've created the largest independent cybersecurity services group in Europe, making this a natural platform from which to continue consolidating in a highly-fragmented market.

Both businesses offer end-to-end consultancy, design, and engineering of cybersecurity systems. However, their true differentiator lies in their managed services, where they continuously monitor and manage clients’ systems 24/7.

This mission-critical support—identifying vulnerabilities, detecting anomalies, and responding to incidents on behalf of clients—creates a highly sticky and indispensable service. Their customers include some of the world’s largest organisations.

Read about Bridewell and I-TRACING's strategic partnership to create an independent European leader in cyber security services

Assured Data Protection

While I-TRACING and Bridewell focus on perimeter security—keeping the bad guys out- Assured Data Protection provides the answer to what happens when the bad guys get in.

As a leading provider of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Assured helps businesses remain operational during cyber or ransomware attacks by protecting, identifying, and restoring compromised data and systems.

Oakley invested in Assured in 2024, following the development of a strong relationship with the founders, who rolled over a significant portion of their stakes. Assured’s mission-critical service and the growing threat of cyber and ransomware attacks offering means the company enjoys almost 100% recurring revenues, very low churn and over 50% organic growth.

Assured combines best-in-class third-party software with its proprietary tech platform to provide a fully managed, automated, and highly efficient solution. This creates barriers to entry, but also enables a high degree of automation, in turn driving strong margins.

Its simplicity and reliability make it an attractive partner for both SMEs, who lack in-house capabilities, and global enterprises like Disney—who could handle this internally but choose Assured for a more effective and cost-efficient solution.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity is a fast-growing, high-demand sector with strong tailwinds. Yet Oakley has approached this space with caution and discipline—spending eight years mapping the market to identify some outstanding businesses. Our initial investments reflect the hallmarks of a classic Oakley deal: founder-led companies with strong growth, recurring revenues, and operating in fragmented markets. By focusing on differentiated service providers and applying our buy-and-build expertise, we’re helping to create market leaders and drive meaningful value creation in this highly attractive tech sector.