Munich Startup: What motivated you to start a company?
Fabiola Munguia: Above all, my own experience with inefficient and heavily manual compliance processes motivated me. It was obvious that companies invest a lot of time and resources in tasks that could be significantly better automated and structured. At that time, there was no such solution in Germany or Europe. This led to the goal of building a solution that makes compliance simpler, more efficient, and scalable.
Munich Startup: What would you have liked to know before your first venture?
Fabiola Munguia: How long it really takes to build a sustainable company. Many things cannot be accelerated, neither product development nor market trust. I also learned that you shouldn’t be too cautious with capital, but instead should invest strategically in strong talent to enable growth.
Munich Startup: How has your company been financed so far?
Fabiola Munguia: Secfix is financed through venture capital and has raised a total of 17 million dollars, most recently in a Series A round of 12 million dollars led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Bayern Kapital and Neosfer, the early-stage investor of the Commerzbank Group.
Conversations as a source of inspiration
Munich Startup: When and where do you get your best ideas?
Fabiola Munguia: The best ideas actually always emerge from exchanges with our customers and my team. Concrete problems and recurring patterns from conversations provide much better approaches than isolated thinking.
Munich Startup: What are your 3 favorite work tools?
Fabiola Munguia: Slack for quick internal communication, Gather for virtual office, and Notion to organize information and processes centrally.
Munich Startup: Your top tip on “pitching”?
Fabiola Munguia: Focus on the problem, not the product. When the problem is clear, relevant, and urgent, the rest explains itself.
Secfix was founded in 2021 by Fabiola Munguia, Grigory Emelianov, and Branko Džakula.
The company started as a GRC automation tool and helps companies achieve certifications like ISO 27001 more efficiently. Today, Secfix is an AI-native end-to-end security compliance platform with customers in 15 European countries.
Munich Startup: Does it currently seem like a good time to start a company? Why?
Fabiola Munguia: I think there’s never a perfect time to start a company. At the same time, 2025 was a record year for new startup foundings in Germany, even stronger than the previous record year 2021. Markets are changing faster than ever through new technologies and increasing regulatory requirements. This creates real problems and thus real opportunities for new solutions.
Munich Startup: Which technology or industry would you focus on for your next venture?
Fabiola Munguia: Hard to say, but probably in the climatetech sector. Many processes there still run manually, while the need for software, efficiency, and scalability is extremely high. And of course, the solution would be ISO-27001-compliant from the start.
Munich’s potential not yet fully realized
Munich Startup: What could be improved at the Munich startup location from your perspective?
Fabiola Munguia: Munich offers a strong network and a lot of industry proximity, but compared to Berlin it’s often less visible and somewhat more reserved in its startup culture. More openness to risk, faster decision-making processes, and an even more networked startup ecosystem would help to better tap into the full potential.
Munich Startup: Which founder or entrepreneur would you like to meet in person? And what would you ask them?
Fabiola Munguia: Melanie Perkins, the founder of Canva. I would ask her what the three most important learnings are that helped her take Canva from Series A to Series B.
