Freddy Milesi

Founder & CEO Sekoia

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Freddy Milesi is the founder and chief executive of Sekoia, a French cybersecurity company he started in 2008 at the age of twenty-six and has run through two complete changes of shape. It began as an audit and consulting firm — risk assessments, compliance work, incident response — and built its reputation on knowing how attackers actually behave. In 2016 Milesi turned it toward publishing its own software, on the argument that understanding threats was more valuable encoded into a product than delivered as a report. The SEKOIA.IO detection platform came to market in 2019 and as a SaaS product in 2020. Then, in 2022, he split the company in two, spinning the entire services business out as an independent firm called OWN so that what remained could be a pure software player. The result is an XDR and cyber threat intelligence platform used by more than 200 security operations teams, funded with roughly 60 million euros, and positioned deliberately as a European alternative to American security vendors — a point Milesi argues publicly and at length.

Career Highlights

• Founded SEKOIA in 2008 at twenty-six, and self-financed the business for more than a decade before raising any outside capital.
• Pivoted the company from cybersecurity audit and consulting to software publishing in 2016.
• Brought the SEKOIA.IO platform to market in 2019 and to SaaS availability in 2020.
• Raised 10 million euros from Omnes Capital and Alliance Entreprendre, and a 26 million euro Series B led by Revaia in April 2025, for roughly 60 million euros in total.
• Led the 2022 carve-out of the services division into OWN, an independent company launching with fifty staff in Paris and Rennes.
• Grew the platform to protect 1.5 million assets for more than 200 SOC teams across over 2,000 organisations, with more than 300 integrations into third-party security tools.
• Worked in technology risk management consulting — Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, ISO 27002 audits, business continuity, ISO 27001 — before founding the company.

Professional Journey

Milesi came into security from the compliance side. Before starting his own company he worked as a senior consultant in technology risk management, on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance programmes, general security audits against ISO 27002, business continuity planning and ISO 27001 implementations — the structured, standards-driven end of the field rather than the offensive or research end.

He founded SEKOIA in 2008, aged twenty-six. For its first decade it was a services business: auditing, consulting, incident response through its CERT, custom threat intelligence, OSINT investigations, governance and red team work. Critically, it was self-financed throughout that period — more than ten years without external capital — which meant growth was constrained by cash but the founders kept control and the company was never obliged to chase a fashionable positioning.

The pivot came in 2016, when Milesi redirected the company toward publishing software. The logic followed from what the services business had learned: if you genuinely understand the threat landscape, the leverage is in encoding that understanding into a detection product rather than selling it by the consultant-day. The metaphor the founders use for the approach is that if you are looking for a needle and you already know what needles look like, you X-ray the haystack rather than picking through it straw by straw — which is a fair description of intelligence-led detection as against signature matching. SEKOIA.IO reached the market in 2019 and became available as SaaS in 2020, the same period in which the company took its first outside money, a 10 million euro round from Omnes Capital and Alliance Entreprendre.

The most consequential structural decision came in 2022. Running a services arm and a software arm inside one company had begun to obscure both: the services work was invisible behind the platform, and the platform was judged partly on the consultancy. Milesi spearheaded a separation prepared over roughly a year, in which the whole services portfolio — CERT and incident response, threat intelligence services, OSINT, consulting, governance risk and compliance, audit and red team — moved into a new independent company, OWN, launching with fifty employees across Paris and Rennes under Arthur Chovet as chief technology officer and Barbara Louis-Sidney leading the CERT. The stated intent was to produce two independent European pure players rather than one hybrid. It is this restructuring, rather than any act of founding, that the company’s own materials date to 2022.

Since then Sekoia has operated as a software business, with Milesi as chief executive alongside Georges Bossert as chief technology officer and Therese Favet as chief financial officer, both described by the company as co-founders, and a leadership team including a chief intelligence officer, chief solution officer and chief revenue officer. Revaia led a 26 million euro Series B in April 2025, taking total funding to roughly 60 million euros and funding international expansion. Milesi has become a prominent voice on European technological sovereignty in security, arguing that the line between criminal and state-sponsored attackers has effectively dissolved because everyone uses everyone else’s tools, that roughly twenty-five nations now have genuine offensive capability, and that Europe’s opportunity lies in building the first open, interoperable and trusted security platform rather than in reproducing American models. He has also pressed for stronger European public procurement to give local vendors the scale to compete.

Education

No educational institution, degree or field of study for Freddy Milesi could be established from any source located during this review, including the company’s own pages, French trade coverage and an investor-published interview. Several of those sources give his age at founding but none names a school. This is recorded as an open question rather than a finding that he holds no degree.