Osavul CEO: “Government Realizes It Cannot Protect Everyone”

Last summer, Ukrainian Osavul’s platform generated a warning about the railway network of one European country. Planned maintenance had closed several important lines, so trains were rerouted to smaller ones, which created bottlenecks across the system. The railway was also carrying troops and cargo for a military exercise. On top of that, the operator had announced plans to lay off around 10,000 people, which meant fewer professionals on the ground.

Outside the company, Osavul picked up other signals. Russian actors were recruiting people in Europe for one-time sabotage jobs on railways, and they were doing it in several countries, including this one. A local radical left-wing group, driven by an ecological agenda, had announced on an underground forum that it would keep attacking the railway. There had also been several attacks on railways in other countries, only a couple of days apart. Finally, the team found a PDF online with images and step-by-step instructions on how to set a railway on fire. Anyone could access it.

“All those things, they create a perfect surface for an attack,”

— says Dmytro Plieshakov, co-founder and CEO of Osavul.

Osavul’s AI correlated the data and produced a scenario: an attack on the railway in a specific region, by a specific threat actor, in July or August. The attack happened on 31 July and later made the news. (op.a. Plieshakov did not name the country or the client.)

Mitigating cases like this one are at the centre of Osavul’s plans for the next few years. The Luxembourg-headquartered company, founded in 2022 by Plieshakov and Dmytro Bilash, closed an €8.5M Series A round at the start of October. The round was led by 33N Ventures, with participation from Balnord, G+D Ventures and existing investor 42CAP. Osavul has raised close to €12M in total and has a team of around 45 people. With the new funding, it wants to bring the intelligence it has built for governments to large European companies.