The young French company thus concludes a second fundraising in a few months. Objective: perform in the United States and recruit.
The start-up MokN, specializing in identity recovery, never ceases to surprise. Launched only two years ago in France, “with 5,000 euros in its pocket”, explains Gautier Bugeon, co-founder and CEO of the company, the young company has already completed its second round of funding. After a first fundraising announced in October 2025, worth 2.6 million euros, this new round allows the start-up to secure 15 million euros in investments. This operation was led by the American fund Google Ventures, which is a first for a French start-up. Datadog and European investors Moonfire, OVNI Capital, and business angels also participated. It will allow MokN to strengthen its presence in the United States, conquer new international markets, and continue to develop its phish-back solution. This helps protect companies against the exploitation of their stolen identifiers.
A platform that traps attackers
The young company was born from a simple idea: rather than scanning the dark web in search of already compromised identifiers, it is better to intercept them upstream, before they even circulate there. “Two years ago, the company in which I worked as a SOC manager suffered a cyber crisis due to very targeted phishing. Although we had all the tools on the market to protect the information system, we were still fooled. So I looked for a solution. Until I told myself that if my network had a false front door, the attackers would have tried to connect to it while informing me about the stolen credentials it was using.”
To do this, MokN’s solution deploys very realistic fake network access points (VPN portals, messaging, etc.) which reproduce the environment of a company. When the attacker connects, he returns the stolen credentials to the company against his will. This allows the company’s cybersecurity team to proactively neutralize the attack. “We do what attackers do: we use the same mechanism as phishing thanks to pages that deceive them. We call it defensive phishing.” MokN now wishes to diversify the use of its solution by also extending it to cookies and stolen sessions. “My ultimate goal is to reproduce the same mechanism for all types of identity. This is why we are going to launch, thanks to this fundraising, a multi-product platform that allows several types of identity to be protected.”
Conquering the American market
Since its first fundraising, MokN has recruited around ten employees specializing in R&D or sales. “Currently, we have around twenty employees. There will be around thirty at the end of the year and our objective is to reach around fifty employees within 12 to 18 months. Recruitment will mainly be in R&D because we want to develop other strategies to trap attackers, among others. Our platform, with all our new products, should be ready in around 12 months.”
With the support of its managers based in Paris and New York, the company also wants to strengthen its presence in Europe and the United States. “Thanks to the first fundraising, we were able to test the deployment of our solution in the United States. We saw that the results were as encouraging as in Europe. There are strong signals which demonstrate that it will work well in the United States. This new fundraising will allow us to deploy a team and our technology there. At the same time, we are also testing the Asian market and the United Kingdom.” To date, MokN’s solution has more than a million users within large groups and mid-sized companies. “And the number of customers is only increasing,” concludes the CEO.
