Maybe it’s something in the water, or maybe it’s the legacy of giants like Avast (now Gen Digital) laying the groundwork, but the Czech capital is currently churning out some of the most sophisticated defence tech I’ve seen in years.
I have spent the last few weeks digging through the local ecosystem, filtering out the noise to find the teams that are actually building something novel rather than just wrapping another firewall in a new UI. What we found was a mix of terrifyingly smart AI defence systems, next-gen network assurance, and cryptographic innovators. If you are an investor, a CISO, or simply a tech-savvy individual like me, these are the names you need to know.
Here is my curated list of the top 10 cybersecurity startups in Prague that are punching way above their weight class.
Resistant AI
We are entering an era where financial crime is no longer human but rather automated, algorithmic, and relentless. This is exactly the battlefield where Resistant AI operates. founded by the team that sold Cognitive Security to Cisco, they have built a system designed to protect your automated decision-making engines from being gamed. They essentially use AI to fight AI, detecting manipulated documents and synthetic identities that would slip past traditional fraud detection filters without triggering a single alert.
What impresses me most about their approach is the focus on document forensics. They don’t just check if a PDF is valid, but they examine the invisible metadata, the compression artefacts, and the subtle inconsistencies that reveal if a bank statement or ID has been edited using Photoshop. It’s high-level financial defence for a world where deepfakes are becoming the standard tool for fraudsters.
Whalebone
You might not think about the DNS layer often, as it’s just the phonebook of the internet, right? Whalebone sees it differently. They have turned the DNS resolution process into a primary defence layer, specifically targeting telecommunications companies and ISPs. Instead of forcing users to install clunky apps or endpoint agents, Whalebone cleans the traffic at the network level. If you are on a protected carrier, you are safe from malware and phishing before the packets even hit your phone.
Their dominance in the telco space is fascinating because it solves the “apathy problem” in cybersecurity. Most consumers won’t update their antivirus software, but they will happily pay a few cents extra for an internet connection that inherently blocks threats. Whalebone has effectively weaponised the pipe itself against attackers, and their adoption rate across Europe suggests they are onto something massive.
ThreatMark
Authentication is broken. Passwords are leaked daily, and SMS two-factor authentication (2FA) is easily intercepted. ThreatMark moves the goalposts entirely by focusing on behavioural biometrics. They don’t just care what you type, they care how you type it. By analysing thousands of data points, from the pressure applied to your phone screen to the speed of your mouse movements, they build a profile that is incredibly difficult for a bot or a human imposter to mimic.
They combine this behavioural analysis with transaction monitoring to create a full-stack fraud prevention platform. It’s particularly popular in the banking sector because it reduces friction. You don’t need to solve a CAPTCHA or find your dongle; you just act like yourself, and the system knows it’s you. If you act suspiciously, or if a Trojan is controlling your device, ThreatMark locks the door.
IP Fabric
Network assurance isn’t the most glamorous term in the industry, but it is the one that keeps CISOs in employment. IP Fabric has built a platform that creates a mathematical model of your entire network infrastructure. It discovers every switch, router, and firewall, maps how they communicate with each other, and then verifies whether your security policies are actually being enforced. It’s essentially a digital twin for your network security posture.
The real value here is visibility. In complex enterprise environments, drift is inevitable, as someone changes a firewall rule at 3 AM to fix an outage and forgets to revert it, leaving a gaping hole. IP Fabric catches these inconsistencies instantly. It’s a sanity check for network engineers who are tired of hoping their diagrams match reality.
TeskaLabs
The industrial sector is currently extremely vulnerable. We have critical infrastructure running on legacy protocols that were never designed to be connected to the internet. TeskaLabs steps into this mess with a focus on IoT and operational technology (OT) security. Their flagship product, SeaCat, handles the complex task of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) and encryption for devices that may not have the processing power required for standard security stacks.
I like them because they are pragmatists. They understand that you can’t just patch a factory floor the way you patch a laptop. They provide the secure connectivity layer that allows smart meters, industrial robots, and medical devices to communicate without becoming easy entry points for ransomware gangs.
Safetica
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software has a reputation for being expensive, intrusive, and impossible to configure. Safetica aims to democratise this space. They have stripped away the complexity usually associated with enterprise DLP, offering a solution that is surprisingly easy to deploy, even for mid-sized companies. Their software monitors how sensitive data moves through an organisation, including who is copying it, emailing it, and uploading it to unauthorised cloud storage.
They have recently pivoted heavily towards “Insider Threat” protection. It’s not always about the hacker in the hoodie breaking in; sometimes it’s the disgruntled employee walking out with a USB drive full of client lists. Safetica spots these behavioural anomalies, protecting companies from their own people without grinding productivity to a halt.
Blindspot
DDoS attacks are getting larger, cheaper, and more complex. Blindspot is a specialised outfit in Prague focused purely on DDoS protection and cyber resilience. They market themselves as the “first line of defence,” offering a BGP-based scrubbing service that cleans traffic before it hits your infrastructure.
What sets them apart is their speed and specificity. They claim to offer granular protection that can distinguish between a legitimate spike in traffic and a sophisticated Layer 7 attack. For companies running high-availability services where even a second of downtime costs thousands, Blindspot’s specialised focus is a serious asset.
ELLIO Technology
If you run a SOC (Security Operations Centre), your biggest enemy is noise. You are drowning in alerts, 99% of which are irrelevant. ELLIO Technology processes the chaotic background radiation of the internet with mass scanning, botnets, and brute-force attempts to create dynamic blocklists. They essentially filter out internet noise, allowing your analysts to focus on targeted threats.
Their “Mass Exploitation” intelligence is particularly clever. They maintain a massive network of honeypots to monitor botnets in real-time. If a new vulnerability is discovered and hackers start scanning for it five minutes later, ELLIO detects it and updates its feeds instantly. It’s a great example of utilising big data to create a quieter and safer perimeter.
Cogniware
Cogniware builds investigation and intelligence software, primarily for law enforcement and large enterprises. Their platform, Argos, is designed to connect the dots across massive, disparate datasets. Imagine you are investigating a financial fraud case; you have data in Excel, emails, a weird transaction log, and some public social media profiles. Cogniware fuses all this together to visualise the hidden relationships.
While they lean towards the intelligence side of cyber, their tech is crucial for threat hunting and internal investigations. In a world where attacks are complex and multi-layered, having a tool that can visually map out the “who, what, and when” is indispensable for security teams trying to understand the scope of a breach.
Peig
We have been promised a passwordless future for a decade, but Peig might actually be the one to deliver it to the enterprise. They have built what they call a Workspace Browser, a secure, containerised environment that runs on any device. Instead of managing the entire laptop (MDM), you manage only this secure browser. It binds the identity to the device using cryptography, making phishing attacks nearly impossible because there are no credentials to steal.
It’s a brilliant pivot for the “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) era. Companies are tired of shipping corporate laptops to contractors, and contractors don’t want invasive spy software on their personal machines. Peig solves this by creating a secure, invisible enclave. You open the browser, you are verified, and you work. No passwords, no friction.
