Dr. Niklas Hellemann wants you to think before you click

A grandmother hands a substantial six-figure sum to a scammer. Somewhere else, a company is fooled by a simple phishing campaign. These are among the stories Niklas Hellemann has told about the beginnings of SoSafe. They have little of the cinematic glamour usually assigned to hacking. No luminous wall of code is required. Someone believes a message. Someone pays. The machinery that interests him is the persuasion that makes the payment possible.

He had been fascinated by persuasion during his psychology studies, long before co-founding a cybersecurity company. The distance between convincing someone and manipulating them was already a subject worth examining. Fraud gave that interest a practical urgency. Looking at the training products available, the founders thought the teaching could be better. Their opening was an everyday problem: helping people remember what to do when a convincing request arrives.

There is something darkly economical about a scam. It can borrow a good quality, such as helpfulness, and put it to bad use. Hellemann’s career has developed around the possibility of teaching people to recognise that transaction while it is happening. In a business crowded with technical vocabulary, he keeps coming back to the person at the keyboard.

A degree in people, a doctorate in business

Hellemann studied psychology at the University of Bonn and in the United States as a Fulbright scholar. He completed his doctorate in business administration at RWTH Aachen University. That combination gave him two ways of looking at a workplace: through the behaviour of the individual and through the organisation that surrounds them. The degrees would eventually meet in an inbox.

His RSA Conference biography also points to an interest in transatlantic exchange on cybersecurity and data. His experience studying abroad sits alongside that outward-facing part of his professional life.

Before SoSafe, he spent six years at Boston Consulting Group, working in People and Organization. Consulting exposed him to large businesses and their internal workings. He wanted to get closer to making something himself. He met Lukas Schaefer and Felix Schürholz through their shared interest in starting a company. The eventual founding team joined psychology, business and software experience, a useful arrangement when the proposed product needed to understand people as well as function on their computers.

SoSafe began in Cologne in 2018. The founders’ early work included conversations with security managers before they wrote code. Listening gave the idea resistance: the useful friction of discovering what a prospective customer actually needs. It is easy to admire this discipline once a company has grown. It is less comfortable when someone’s answer threatens a favourite plan.

Cologne, with room for questions

The beginning came with practical help. SoSafe took part in the EXIST programme and received support from TH Köln. Hellemann recalled being the first team to get an office in the university’s incubator, with advice, a mentor and a network alongside the space. The questions could be wonderfully unromantic: how, for example, do you hire your first employee? A founding myth benefits from a garage. A new employer benefits from an answer.

Cologne mattered beyond the office. Having lived elsewhere, including the United States, Hellemann kept coming back. He has spoken warmly about the city’s openness, tolerance and interest in newcomers, qualities he also saw as helpful when attracting international colleagues. He has opinions about its streets, too, arguing for more ambitious mobility planning and better cycling infrastructure. His affection leaves room for suggestions.

A place enters a company in small ways. It supplies the first introductions, the nearby businesses worth approaching and the people who might join. For Hellemann, Cologne offered a social character he wanted to keep around him. An international business can begin with a very local judgment about where conversations tend to go well.

Make the lesson worth remembering

SoSafe’s early product used repeated phishing simulations to create moments of learning inside an employee’s working day. A suspicious message could become a chance to practise. Short, interactive lessons helped explain the clues. Reporting an email could turn the recipient into someone contributing to the organisation’s defence. The educational question was whether the lesson would survive beyond the moment it appeared on screen.

In July 2020, when Acton Capital joined existing investor Global Founders Capital in a seven-figure pre-Series A round, SoSafe had more than 200 corporate customers and a team of 55. Its work already joined cybersecurity expertise with educational psychology. Hellemann emphasised usability and employee privacy. The product had to make sense to both the security administrator buying it and the employee living with it.

That dual audience matters. A system can look excellent in a purchasing meeting and become an irritation everywhere else. Training asks for attention, a currency employees are already spending in several directions. Hellemann’s insistence on engagement gives the apparently frivolous question of whether a lesson is enjoyable a serious purpose. A lesson that people avoid has a rather limited teaching career.

Hellemann has also argued for an open culture around mistakes. In a 2024 podcast conversation, he discussed learning from exercises and improving the processes around them. That is an organisational choice as much as an instructional one. People need a reason to bring a concern forward. A reporting button can be installed in software; the willingness to use it depends on what people expect will happen next.

The founder has to learn, too

In January 2022, SoSafe announced a $73 million Series B led by Highland Europe. Existing investors Acton Capital and Global Founders Capital participated, alongside investors including Carsten Thoma, La Famiglia and Christian Henschel. The stated plans were international expansion and further product development. The company had passed 1,500 customer organisations and 250 employees. Financing gave the founders more room to act, with more responsibility attached.

Hellemann’s account of leadership has changed with that responsibility. Solving the original problem remains necessary; so does building an organisation capable of continuing the work. He has described deliberate investment in communication, off-sites and strategy weeks as the team expanded. Shared purpose needs occasions on which people can actually share it. Culture has a tendency to become a decorative noun unless someone gives it a place in the calendar.

“One of my key principles is to hire for mindset and attitude.”

Niklas Hellemann, on building the team

He names curiosity, resilience and a desire to learn among the qualities he values. His retrospective advice includes holding to hiring principles even when resources make compromise attractive. There is a pleasing difficulty here for a founder: the company must learn to act beyond the founder. The work of leadership includes helping other people make decisions well enough that every decision need not return to the same desk.

On January 2, 2025, SoSafe became a Societas Europaea, a European company. Its announcement described more than 5,000 customers in 37 countries and over 500 employees. Hellemann presented the legal change as a way to support international growth. An organisation’s paperwork rarely wins the storytelling contest. It does reveal the less photogenic work required when an idea acquires offices, colleagues and customers across borders.

New tricks, familiar instincts

The product has widened, too. SoSafe introduced its Human Risk OS in 2024, bringing together tools to identify, assess and respond to human security risk. Hellemann has argued that basic awareness and knowledge transfer need to develop into a broader approach to behaviour. Knowing a rule and applying it in an awkward moment are separate achievements. The second is the one an attacker hopes to interrupt.

His public writing follows the opportunities criminals find in ordinary enthusiasm. In a 2023 article about Threads, he examined how interest in a new social platform could create openings for fraud. He encouraged stronger account protection and greater care about what people share. A fashionable app gives the con artist a fresh setting. The appeal to excitement and trust is familiar.

In a September 2025 interview, Hellemann recalled discussing AI-enabled threats at a German cybersecurity agency event in 2021. He remembered a small room filling for a talk about possibilities that were then less widely discussed. He also challenged the expectations attached to the phrase artificial intelligence. His concern was practical misuse of the technology already available, including its role in making deception easier to produce.

A SoSafe update dated January 2026 described ways to bring real attacks into training more quickly. Recreate Attack would rebuild a safe simulation from a screenshot of a phishing email. The same update outlined a multi-channel attack orchestrator planned for 2026. Those announcements show the direction of the work: practice needs to keep pace with the messages people encounter. Product plans remain plans until delivered; the underlying educational problem keeps moving meanwhile.

Still curious, still in Cologne

Hellemann’s work also reaches beyond the product through the Human Firewall Podcast, where he has explored cybersecurity with guests from business, technology and public life. His speaking calendar includes the Signal Security Summit in Cologne on November 18, 2026. The public conversation gives him another setting for a recurring interest: how people understand a problem, and what might help them respond.

Asked in 2024 what advice he would put on a billboard for students, he returned to curiosity. He credited his parents with encouraging it and connected an interest in people with friendships and business relationships. For a career that moves between psychology, organisations and fraud, the answer has a certain consistency. Look closely. Ask another question. A request may become less convincing under examination. A person may become more interesting.