Serify Receives the Pioneer Funding from MILS

Building a cybersecurity startup in Germany means navigating a landscape where the need for innovation is enormous, but the structures to support it are still catching up. That is exactly why we are excited to announce that Serify has been awarded the Pioneer Funding by the Montan-Innovation-Lab-Saar GmbH (MILS). The grant of 40,000 EUR runs from 01.04.2026 through 30.09.2026, giving us a focused six-month window to advance our product.

What MILS Brings to the Table

The Montan-Innovation-Lab-Saar GmbH is one of the newer players in Germany’s growing network of innovation hubs, with a clear mission: fostering startups that bring real technological value to industry and society. Based in the Saarland region, MILS has built an ecosystem that connects founders with mentorship, funding, and access to a network of industrial partners. The Pioneer Funding is their instrument for backing early-stage ventures with both capital and hands-on support.

For us, this is more than a funding milestone. It is a partnership with an organization that understands what early-stage deep-tech companies need: room to build, access to the right people, and a support structure that goes beyond writing a check.

Why This Cooperation Works

Serify’s focus on automating cyber threat intelligence, from incident detection and classification to triage and reporting, fits naturally into what MILS is looking to cultivate. The Saarland region has a strong foundation in IT security research, with institutions such as the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security nearby. MILS tapping into cybersecurity as a strategic vertical makes sense, and we are glad to be part of that effort.

From our side, the value is equally clear. The Pioneer Funding gives us the resources to accelerate product development at a critical stage, while the MILS network opens doors to industrial partners and pilot customers who need better threat intelligence tooling.

Concretely, the funding allows us to invest in two areas that are essential for our next phase: improving and expanding the datasets that power our threat intelligence automation, and planning and experimenting with scaling our infrastructure on European cloud services. Both are foundational steps toward a product that works reliably at scale while keeping data sovereignty front and center.

A Team Effort

No startup reaches a milestone like this alone. We want to thank everyone at MILS who made this possible, from the selection committee to the team supporting us through onboarding.

We also want to express our sincere gratitude to HIGHEST at TU Darmstadt, the entrepreneurship center that has been part of our journey from the very beginning. HIGHEST’s support, from mentorship to connecting us with the right resources, laid the groundwork that made this step possible. The combination of TU Darmstadt’s strong cybersecurity research environment and HIGHEST’s startup infrastructure has been instrumental for Serify.

To everyone involved: thank you. This kind of cross-regional, cross-institutional cooperation is exactly what Germany’s startup ecosystem needs more of.

What Comes Next

With the Pioneer Funding secured and a clear six-month runway ahead, we are focused on building. Better datasets, European-first infrastructure, and a product that makes threat intelligence actionable for security teams of any size. The support from MILS and HIGHEST gives us the backing to move faster toward that goal.

If you are working on threat intelligence challenges or are curious about what we are building, we would love to hear from you.