PRESS RELEASE

Paris, April 4, 2023

The iliad Group acquires a majority stake in ITrust, France’s leading cybersecurity specialist

The iliad Group is announcing that it has acquired a majority stake in ITrust, a technological software publisher and services company specialized in cybersecurity. A French pure player, ITrust is the only company in France to offer a cybersecurity platform that’s 100% proprietary and fully sovereign. Drawing on the expertise of ITrust, Free Pro – the B2B subsidiary of the iliad Group – is today launching its Cyber XPR offer to bring cybersecurity within every organization’s reach.

Thanks to the know-how built up over the past fifteen years by its R&D team, ITrust offers a unique, fully sovereign, cybersecurity solution based on artificial intelligence, and certified by France’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI).

The quality and reliability of ITrust’s services have won the trust of more than 400 clients worldwide, of which six are CAC 40 companies in France. These organizations operate in diverse sectors, including in sensitive domains and environments, such as the French Ministry of Defense and some fifty hospital groups that have signed with ITrust in the last 12 months. 

By becoming the majority shareholder of ITrust, the iliad Group is pursuing its strategy in the B2B market and is meeting one of the main current challenges of the sector – cybersecurity. Sharing Free’s same values of innovation, simplicity and entrepreneurial mindset, ITrust’s founder remains a shareholder in the company.  

Through this acquisition, Free Pro, an operator of Telecom and sovereign cloud services and the B2B subsidiary of the iliad Group, is cementing its strategy of partnering all organizations by bringing them technological innovations, and today is launching Cyber XPR, a unique protection solution in response to new cyber threats.

Thomas Reynaud, Chief Executive Officer of the iliad Group, gave this message: “With this acquisition, Free Pro is continuing to develop its service offering for all organizations and public-sector entities. ITrust will be a real accelerator for the Group in the strategic domain of cybersecurity. With ITrust we share the same entrepreneurial mindset and innovation values.”

Denis Planat, Chief Executive Officer of Free Pro, stated: “Faced with the risks of cyber threats, our role is to help companies and public sector entities adopt comprehensive solutions to effectively protect their network and IT infrastructures. With ITrust and our datacenters’ hosting services, Cyber XPR provides our clients with the only solution 100% made in France, guaranteeing the highest level of protection and total sovereignty. Our objective is for all of our clients, from the smallest company or public sector entity to the largest organization, to have access to a Free Pro cybersecurity solution best suited to their needs. As always, our investments for all of our customers are guided by our three watchwords: innovation, simplicity and affordability. This offer is available as from today”.

Jean-Nicolas Piotrowski, Chairman and Founder of ITrust, said: “We are proud to be joining Free Pro today, with the ambition of offering all French organizations a comprehensive cybersecurity platform. Our solution – the outcome of 15 years’ experience – enables us to detect both known and unknown cyber threats. Our AI-based threat analysis capabilities combined with the expertise of our cyber analysts, allow us to anticipate attacks and guarantee the security of the infrastructures that we manage”.

About the iliad Group

Created in the early 1990s, the iliad Group is the inventor of the world’s first triple-play box and has grown into a major European telecoms player, standing out for its innovative, straightforward and attractive offerings. The Group is the parent of Free in France, iliad in Italy and Play in Poland, has over 16,700 employees serving 45.9 million active subscribers, and generated €8.4 billion in revenues in 2022. In France, the Group is an integrated Fixed and Mobile Ultra-Fast Broadband operator and had 21.4 million retail subscribers at December 31, 2022 (14.2 million mobile subscribers and 7.2 million fixed-line subscribers). In Italy – where the Group launched its business in 2018 under the iliad brand, becoming the country’s fourth mobile operator with 12% market share – it had almost 9.6 million subscribers at December 31, 2022. In Poland, the Group became an integrated convergent operator after the acquisition of UPC Polska in 2022 and had almost 12.8 million mobile subscribers and more than 2 million fixed-line subscribers at December 31, 2022. With the acquisition of Play and UPC Polska in 2020 and 2022, respectively, the iliad Group has become Europe’s sixth-largest mobile operator in terms of number of subscribers for retail Mobile (excluding M2M) and Fixed Internet.

Find out more at:

www.iliad.fr/en

Follow us on:

Twitter @Groupeiliad

LinkedIn Groupe iliad 

Contacts

Investor relations: ir@iliad.fr
Press relations: presse@iliad.fr

About Free Pro

Free Pro, the B2B subsidiary of the iliad Group, is dedicated to making secure high-performance mobility, connectivity and cloud technologies available to all businesses and public organizations. Free Pro is liberating companies through straightforward, innovative and best-price solutions. With its local support and expertise acquired over the past 20 years, the company is helping more than 35,000 businesses and public organizations to accelerate their digital transformation. By offering simple, high-performance Free Pro fixed-line and mobile services and XPR solutions that meet complex challenges, the company addresses the entire corporate market, from small businesses to large corporates. To achieve this, the company uses its own sovereign datacenters located in France and interconnected via its own fiber optic network. The datacenters are ISO 27001 and HDS-certified, attesting to their compliance with the highest ecodesign, operating and security standards. The company continuously invests in very high availability infrastructure and provides local services to its clients through its network of regional agencies.

freepro.com

About ITrust

ITrust is a French company set up in 2007 by engineers passionate about developing cybersecurity solutions. Today, it supports companies in strengthening their cybersecurity by offering its expertise and a cybersecurity software suite. ITrust’s Reveelium sovereign technology developed in France is a leading tool for the use of artificial intelligence to maximize cyber security. This SIEM/SOC UEBA/XDR tool enables threats to be detected very early on, therefore limiting the damage caused to organizations. ITrust focuses constantly on innovation and has gained a reputation for developing disruptive technologies. In 2018, it designed France’s first AI and cybersecurity laboratory and is the co-founder of the AN 21 cybersecurity training school. With over 400 clients in France and worldwide, including six CAC 40 companies, ITrust protects public sector entities (ministries, critical infrastructure operators, essential service operators), industrial companies (transportation, aerospace), banks and healthcare establishments (hospitals, laboratories and a major French medical research center). The company has set itself the target of becoming a European leader in AI-based cybersecurity.

itrust.fr