Amsterdam Startup Raises $7.6M to Guard the Systems Powering Your World

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-22

When a hospital goes dark or the water stops flowing, the cause often isn't a broken pipe or a blown fuse. Increasingly, it's a cyberattack. That's the reality Indurex is betting on, and investors just handed the Amsterdam-based startup $7.6 million (€7 million) to build its defense. The funding came less than nine months after the company emerged from stealth. Contrarian Ventures led the round, with Axeleo Capital and Dutch venture firm Curiosity joining in. ### The Problem With Watching Only the Network Most industrial cybersecurity tools keep an eye on the network. They watch packets, spot odd traffic, and fire off alerts. That's useful, but it misses something bigger. A network alert doesn't tell an operator whether a plant is still running within safe limits. "Detection alone is no longer enough," said Rokas Peciulaitis, founder and managing partner at Contrarian Ventures. He points out that electrification is pushing more critical infrastructure online, and the damage from attacks is felt in the physical world: cold homes, dark hospitals, water that stops flowing. That gap is exactly where Indurex plays. Founded by Jalal Bouhdada and Maarten Oosterink, both veterans of operational technology (OT), process safety, and cybersecurity, the company launched in January 2026. Its mission is simple to state and hard to execute: keep complex cyber-physical systems resilient, safe, and secure. ### How SafeGuard AI Actually Works The company's platform, Indurex SafeGuard AI, pulls data from distributed control systems, safety instrumented systems, historians, alarm management systems, and IT security tools. Then AI agents step in to surface anomalies and engineering deviations. The result is a single view that connects a cybersecurity alert to the physical process behind it. Instead of asking "what happened on the network?" operators can ask "what does this mean for the plant?" That's a shift conventional OT security systems haven't managed. > "Cyber defences in these critical sectors have focused solely on the network. We focus on the core industrial data itself: the engineering, process and safety signals that determine whether a plant is operating within safe limits." — Jalal Bouhdada, co-founder and CEO of Indurex Bouhdada calls this missing layer "Engineering Intelligence," and he argues that cybersecurity and operational excellence have been managed as separate disciplines for far too long. ### Why the Timing Matters The threat isn't theoretical. According to the SANS Institute's State of ICS/OT Security 2025 survey, more than one in five industrial organizations dealt with an ICS or OT cyber incident in the past year. Of those, 40% disrupted operations, and nearly 20% took more than a month to fully fix. A month of downtime in a manufacturing plant or an energy facility adds up fast. And the fix isn't just patching software; it's understanding whether the physical process itself stayed safe the whole time. ### Who's Already Using It Indurex says its early customers range from mid-sized energy and manufacturing companies to large multinationals. They're reportedly seeing value in three areas: - **Operational excellence and safety integrity** through unified situational awareness - **Cyber resilience** with detection and response tied to operational and safety impact - **Compliance** via automated reporting against frameworks like IEC 62443, IEC 61511/61508, NIS2, NIST CSF, and NERC CIP That last point matters more than it might seem. Compliance reporting eats up engineering hours, and automating it frees teams to focus on the actual plant. ### What Comes Next Indurex plans to put the fresh capital into research and development. It also wants to expand commercial operations across Europe and the Middle East first, then move into the United States and Asia-Pacific. For operators in oil and gas, power, utilities, manufacturing, and data centers, the message is clear. The line between a network alert and a physical safety event is thinner than most teams assume. Indurex is betting that closing that gap is the next big thing in industrial security, and a group of sharp investors seems to agree.