Luxembourg-based Heelr today launched a business-to-business platform that connects organizations with identity-verified cybersecurity professionals for contract and project work.

Companies can hire through the new platform for penetration testing, compliance preparation and virtual chief information security officer work. Rates advertised on the site for sample providers run from $145 to $250 an hour.

Heelr is aiming at buyers who have no security function of their own to call on. That covers founders, operations staff and information technology managers who end up owning security questions by default.

Providers have to clear an identity check before they can accept paid work, and Heelr validates their credentials separately. Engagements are broken into milestone payments. The company says that structure gives both sides more confidence about getting what they agreed to.

Compliance deadlines drive much of the demand. A customer security questionnaire, an ISO 27001 audit or a penetration test booked ahead of a product launch all arrive with a date attached, and the European Union’s NIS2 and DORA rules have added more of them. Few smaller companies keep a full-time security team on hand to absorb that work.

Heelr also pointed to artificial intelligence as a factor in the demand. Small teams now build and ship products at a pace that would have needed a much larger engineering group a few years ago. Few of those teams include a security engineer.

Security services are the largest single line item in corporate security budgets. Gartner Inc. expects worldwide spending on them to reach $86.1 billion in 2026, a bit more than 40% of all cybersecurity spending.

Laurent Halimi, chief executive of Heelr and its parent company Cyberr SA, said the security industry has changed enormously over the past decade while the way companies buy security expertise has barely moved. Buyers still fall back on “referrals, email chains and manual contracting” when they need an outside specialist, he said. Halimi added that general-purpose freelancer sites offer little assurance that a cybersecurity professional has the expertise claimed, “or that they are even who they say they are.”

Heelr does not start empty. Its providers come out of Cyberr, the professional network for cybersecurity workers that Cyberr SA also runs. Members there keep verified credential listings and look for work.

The Cyberr platform launched in March 2024, after Nexten.io merged with the U.K. recruitment firm Elite. Halimi has run the combined business out of Luxembourg since then. Last year the company picked up the French cybersecurity community CyberTee.

The provider side is open too. Independent consultants can list themselves on the platform. Boutique security firms can as well.

The platform is generally available starting today.

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