Mokn’s business model explained: How it makes money

Most security companies sell you a better lock. MokN decided to build a better trap.

It is a bold idea. And honestly, when you hear it for the first time, it sounds almost too clever to be real. But that is exactly what made it stick. Paris-based MokN is a B2B cybersecurity startup that does not wait for attackers to cause damage before raising the alarm. It lures them in, catches them in the act, and recovers stolen credentials before a single real system is touched. In under three years, the company went from a seed-round idea to a Google Ventures-backed platform protecting over one million users worldwide.

Here is how it actually happened.

How MokN Started: Problem, Solution, and Target Audience

The reality is, credential theft is not a new problem. It is just a wildly unsolved one. According to the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, stolen credentials remain the number one entry point for cyberattacks globally. Phishing drives about 60% of reported intrusions across Europe. And yet, for most companies, the response has been the same for years: get breached, find out too late, try to limit the fallout.

Gautier Bugeon had seen this cycle from the inside. He was a former SOC manager, the kind of person whose job is to stare at alerts and try to catch fires before they spread. He knew, more than anyone, how frustrating it was to get a dark web alert telling you that your company’s credentials had been exposed weeks after the fact. So when he co-founded MokN alongside Antoine Coudoux, the goal was simple: stop playing catch-up.

Their answer was deception. MokN built what it calls “phish-back” technology. The system deploys fake but incredibly realistic access points, replica VPN portals, mirror-image webmail interfaces, that look exactly like a company’s real infrastructure. When an attacker tries to use stolen credentials on these decoys, they unknowingly hand those credentials back to the defender. Security teams get alerted in real time. The threat gets neutralised before it ever reaches a live system.

The company targets organisations of all sizes, from growing mid-market businesses to multinationals. Its clients collectively generate over EUR 330 billion in annual revenue. Finance, retail, healthcare. And it operates across North America and Europe, with the United Kingdom now in its sights too.

Competitive Advantage

Let’s be honest. “We do cybersecurity differently” is something every startup says. But MokN actually does.

Here is the kicker: the big players in identity security, think SailPoint, RSA, ForgeRock, are largely built around managing access and responding to incidents after they occur. MokN does not compete in that lane. It has named its own category: Active Identity Recovery. The idea is not to detect breaches. It is to recover compromised identities before anyone gets hurt.

Speed matters too. The platform is built to go live in minutes. Not months. That alone separates it from most enterprise security tools, which require long integration projects before they deliver any value.

And then there is the noise problem. Anyone who has worked in a SOC will tell you that alert fatigue is real. Too many tools flag everything. MokN’s Baits product is designed to filter aggressively, only alerting clients when real, valid credentials are actively being tested against decoys. Less noise. More signal. That is genuinely useful.

Finally, there is the founder angle. Bugeon came from the world his product serves. GV partner Luna Schmid said it plainly: their investment was driven by his “founder-market fit.” That is not marketing talk. It means the product was built by someone who felt the pain personally.

Marketing Technique

MokN is not running Super Bowl ads. Its approach is much more surgical.

The core of its go-to-market strategy is direct B2B sales. Security buyers, CISOs, SOC managers, heads of IT, are a sceptical group. They have been burned by vendors who overpromise. So MokN leads with proof. A referenced client, a security leader at a French multinational, reported intercepting freshly stolen credentials within days of deploying the platform. That kind of result closes deals faster than any brochure.

Then there is the PR flywheel. Both the EUR 2.6 million seed round in October 2025 and the USD 15 million Series A in May 2026 generated significant press coverage across European and North American tech media. That earned coverage builds credibility in a way that paid advertising simply cannot, especially in an industry built on trust.

And the investor network is not just money. With Google Ventures and Datadog among its backers, MokN gains warm introductions into thousands of enterprise engineering and security teams. That is a distribution channel most startups spend years trying to build.

So the marketing approach, at its core, is: prove it works fast, get the press to talk about it, and let world-class investors open doors.

How MokN Makes Money

Subscriptions: MokN sells access to its Baits platform on a recurring basis. The pricing is tiered, meaning smaller organizations can get in at a level that makes sense for their size, while large enterprises pay more for broader coverage. This structure gives the company predictable, compounding annual recurring revenue.

By the time it announced its seed round in late 2025, MokN had already crossed EUR 1 million in ARR. For an early-stage startup, that is a real number. It signals that people are not just trialling the product. They are paying for it, renewing it, and building it into their security stack.

The longer-term play is expanding beyond Baits into a full multi-product platform for active identity theft protection. More products mean more revenue per client and deeper relationships that are harder to walk away from.

Market Share of MokN

The reality is, MokN is still a small fish in a very large pond. According to Tracxn, the company ranks 44th among 192 active competitors in its segment. The established players have brand recognition, sales teams, and years of customer relationships that take time to displace.

But here is the thing: MokN is not trying to out-SailPoint SailPoint. It is building in a space those companies have largely ignored. With over one million users now on the platform, including clients from the Fortune Global 500, MokN has demonstrated that its model scales. The USD 15 million Series A from GV represents the market’s most credible vote of confidence that this niche is real, growing, and worth fighting for.

Business Model Canvas of MokN

Component	Detail
Value Proposition	Real-time credential recovery using deception technology; neutralises threats before damage occurs
Customer Segments	Mid-market to large enterprises in finance, retail, and healthcare across Europe and North America
Channels	Direct B2B sales, investor network referrals, earned PR from funding milestones
Customer Relationships	Long-term subscriptions with tailored threat intelligence per client
Revenue Streams	Subscription fees via Baits product, tiered by organisation scale
Key Resources	Phish-back deception engine, Baits product, cybersecurity talent, investor relationships
Key Activities	R&D for new decoy environments, enterprise sales, product expansion, threat intelligence
Key Partnerships	Google Ventures, Datadog, Moonfire, OVNI Capital, Kima Ventures
Cost Structure	Engineering, R&D, sales and marketing, customer success, infrastructure

Conclusion: Is MokN a Viable Business?

Yes. But let me explain why, because the reasons matter more than the answer.

Cybersecurity is a crowded space full of startups that solve problems nobody actually has, or solve real problems in ways nobody actually wants to buy. MokN avoids both traps. Credential theft is demonstrably getting worse. And their solution works fast enough that clients see the value within days, not quarters.

The commercial proof points are hard to dismiss. Over EUR 1 million in ARR before a Series A. Google Ventures writing a cheque as its first-ever French investment. Datadog, a company that lives inside the security stacks of thousands of enterprises globally, participating as a strategic investor. These are not small signals.

It is lonely building a company in a new category. You have to convince people that the problem is real, that your solution works, and that they should trust you over the incumbents. That takes time. And MokN is still early. US expansion is just beginning. The broader multi-product platform is still being built.

But the foundation is solid. The timing is right. And the team has the scars to prove they understand what they are building and why it matters. That, in the end, is what separates startups that make it from the ones that do not.

MokN Raises €12.9M