Strand Intelligence, a Manchester-based cybersecurity software company, has closed a 拢1m seed round.
The round was led by Osney Capital and will be used to accelerate the startup’s hiring and product development plans.
Founded in 2025 and based in Ancoats, Strand is building automation for Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR), the investigative work that follows a security incident.
Its platform automates investigations across cloud and endpoint environments and claims to deliver investigations up to five times faster.
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The company’s co-founders, Will Poole and Oli Fletcher, met as next-door neighbours and developed the idea for Strand while talking over the garden fence.
Fletcher said: “Having explored a variety of technology hubs across the UK, Manchester is the clear leader for new business innovation, talent, ambition and a thriving community that backs each other.
“Our business will remain Manchester-centric as we expand operations down to the south of England, out into EMEA and North America over the coming months and years.”
Poole added: “After a decade across multiple cybersecurity investigation roles, not much has changed.
“Ten years of new and improved proactive security software has come out. Security teams have more data than ever, but when things go wrong, which they do at an ever-increasing rate, we fall back, as we always have, on our most important and scarce resource: human expertise.
“That is the problem we built Strand to solve, taking the heavy investigation work off people so their expertise goes where it actually matters.”
Adam Cragg, a partner at Osney Capital, said: “Strand is solving one of the most stubborn problems in cybersecurity, which is how to investigate incidents fast enough to keep up with threat actors.
“Their platform multiplies what a team can investigate across all its investigative capability, improving security posture without replacing expertise.
“Oli and Will have the team and the ambition to make Strand a category leader from Manchester outward.”