Test of Things raised €1.2 million to fix the cybersecurity problem of connected devices
HELSINKI, FINLAND March 31st, 2026 – Think about how many gadgets in your life are connected to the internet. Your phone, maybe your thermostat, your TV, a fitness tracker, a baby monitor, a car. If you work in a factory or an office building, add a few dozen more to that list — sensors, controllers, industrial machines, all quietly talking to each other and to the cloud.
Now here's the uncomfortable question: how secure are they?
The honest answer, for many of them, is not very. And the people building these devices know it — as well as the authorities.
That's the problem Rauli Kaksonen and Marko Kaasila set out to solve when they founded Test of Things, a cybersecurity startup that just raised a €1.2 million pre-seed funding round.
The problem hiding in plain sight
When a company builds a connected device — whether it's a smart lock, a hospital monitor, or a piece of factory equipment — it has to make sure that device is secure before selling it. That sounds reasonable. The catch is how they do it today: cybersecurity testing and compliance documentation is largely manual work of highly skilled experts, thus very expensive. And it doesn’t scale when today’s market is flooded with connected products.
"Cybersecurity of products is in everyone's interest," says Marko Kaasila, CEO and co-founder of Test of Things. "But the current way of assuring it — manual, not systematic, and expensive — is unsustainable."
Every insecure device that makes it to market is a potential door left unlocked for cyber criminals to exploit— hack your personal data, the operational systems of the factory, or the controls within an office building, even threatening essential critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid.
The answer: let the AI do the most laborious work
Test of Things is building a platform that automates cybersecurity compliance testing end-to-end. Instead of a team of cybersecurity experts spending weeks combing through a device's security manually, their AI-powered software handles the heavy lifting — running tests continuously, flagging issues early, and generating the compliance documentation that regulators increasingly require.
For device manufacturers, this means getting secure products to market faster. For the rest of us, it means the things we invite into our homes and workplaces are a little less likely to be someone else's backdoor.
Rauli Kaksonen, CTO and co-founder, puts it simply: "This investment will let us focus on building the product further and start helping manufacturers to achieve their customers’ and authorities’ trust with secure products."
Who's betting on them
The €1.2 million round was led by Vendep Capital, with backing from a strong cast of industry veterans: Aapo Oksman, Zach Shelby, Neil Costigan, and ScanABC. Business Finland innovation funding rounds out the total.
Sami Ahvenniemi, Partner at Vendep Capital, explains why they moved fast: "The market for IoT and OT security and compliance testing is entering a high-growth phase driven by two converging megatrends: firstly, the increasing integration of industrial control systems, IIoT and OT networks into enterprise IT and cloud ecosystems; and secondly, the rising regulatory and operational risk environment around critical infrastructure, manufacturing, energy and utilities. When two successful entrepreneurs with 100% relevant experience put their heads together to build a testing platform, we wanted to jump in right from the start!"
The fresh capital will go toward growing the engineering team and accelerating the platform development— so that the next generation of connected devices can be shipped with a little bit more peace of mind.
