Madrid-based cybersecurity startup 8Layers has secured a €1 million extension to its pre-seed financing, increasing the company’s total funding to €2.5 million as it begins commercial expansion across Europe. The new capital comes from Criteria Venture Tech, the venture investment arm of CriteriaCaixa, and Spanish bank Bankinter, adding two financial-sector backers to the company’s shareholder base. The extension follows an initial €1.5 million pre-seed round completed in 2025 and arrives shortly after the commercial launch of 8Layers’ identity security platform.
Funding and Expansion Strategy
8Layers plans to use the additional financing to strengthen its go-to-market operations and accelerate commercialization across European markets, where organizations face growing pressure to secure increasingly complex digital environments. Chief Executive and co-founder Daniel García Morán described the participation of Criteria Venture Tech and Bankinter as strategic validation from institutions familiar with credential-based threats and regulatory obligations. Their involvement could also provide the young company with valuable financial-sector expertise as it seeks enterprise customers operating under demanding security and compliance requirements.
Addressing the Identity Security Challenge
Founded in 2024, 8Layers focuses on protecting digital identities across cloud applications, infrastructure, service accounts, application programming interfaces, and emerging artificial intelligence agents. The company is targeting a security landscape in which employees, machines, and autonomous systems may hold credentials and permissions across numerous disconnected services, creating gaps that attackers can exploit. Criteria Venture Tech argues that this expansion of non-human identities is exposing architectural weaknesses in traditional security systems, which were largely designed around employees accessing conventional business applications.
A Unified Security Platform
The startup’s platform brings Identity Security Posture Management, Identity Threat Detection and Response, and automated compliance capabilities into one system built on a shared identity data layer. It is designed to inventory both human and non-human identities, correlate activity across multiple sources, identify risky behavior, and support automated actions such as revoking sessions or isolating compromised accounts. The product also connects security monitoring with compliance processes, allowing changes in identity risk or control status to be reflected in regulatory evidence and alerts rather than handled through separate tools and manual spreadsheets.
Technical Foundations and Founding Team
8Layers was established by Daniel García Morán, Pedro Palao, Pablo Carretero, and Iago Salgado, a group with extensive experience in cybersecurity, data infrastructure, and scalable enterprise systems. The founders are alumni of Spanish cybersecurity company Devo, where they worked across engineering, systems, data, and threat research before applying that background to identity protection. According to Criteria Venture Tech, the startup is also developing a proprietary graph-based database intended to adapt to usage patterns and support the long-context correlations required for real-time detection and artificial intelligence models.
Regulation and Commercial Timing
The platform became commercially available in May 2026 and includes support for compliance frameworks such as Spain’s National Security Framework, the European Union’s NIS2 directive, and ISO 27001. This regulatory focus could help distinguish 8Layers in Europe, where security teams must demonstrate that identity controls remain effective while managing the rapid adoption of cloud services and artificial intelligence tools. By combining continuous compliance with threat detection and posture management, the company is positioning its product as an alternative to fragmented identity and security stacks assembled from multiple specialist products.
The pre-seed extension provides 8Layers with additional resources to move from product development into broader commercial execution while deepening its links to Spain’s financial and corporate investment ecosystem. Its opportunity rests on whether enterprises adopt a unified approach to governing employees, machine accounts, and artificial intelligence agents as identity-related risks become more difficult to monitor manually. With €2.5 million raised and a commercially available platform, the startup will now need to convert investor confidence and regulatory demand into sustained customer adoption across Europe.