Summary
- Huntress has added QBS Software Africa as a distributor for its security platform.
- The expansion begins in South Africa and is intended to extend into selected sub-Saharan markets.
- The agreement builds on an existing Huntress-QBS relationship rather than establishing the partnership for the first time.
Huntress has expanded its channel relationship with QBS Software into Africa, using the distributor’s South African base to take its managed security platform into a market where cybercrime losses and demand for outsourced security capability are both rising.
The arrangement will give local value-added resellers and managed service providers access to Huntress’ Agentic Security Platform and security operations services through QBS Software Africa. The initial focus is South Africa, with selected sub-Saharan markets expected to follow.
The agreement should be understood as an expansion of an existing distribution relationship rather than the beginning of a new partnership. Huntress announced a broader QBS Software UK and EMEA arrangement earlier this year, while QBS Software Africa now lists Huntress among the vendors in its regional portfolio.
The African expansion sits outside Cyber Insider’s normal UK and European geographic centre, but it has a direct European channel and supplier dimension. Huntress is extending a distribution model already used in EMEA while multinational organisations and service providers increasingly operate security programmes spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The company says it protects more than 270,000 businesses across over 100 countries. Its customer base is heavily associated with small and mid-sized organisations and managed service providers, where outsourced detection and response can compensate for the difficulty of maintaining an internal 24-hour security operation.
That model has particular relevance in markets where specialist cyber skills remain unevenly distributed. INTERPOL’s 2026 African Cyberthreat Assessment describes a growing cybercrime economy across the continent and says AI was involved in 55% of cybercrime cases reported in its survey.
The same report cites aggregated estimates placing direct economic damage from cybercrime in Africa at at least $5 billion during 2025. That should not be confused with separately reported loss figures in the assessment, which increased from $192 million to $484 million. The measures cover different underlying data and cannot be used interchangeably.
Huntress’ announcement uses that threat environment as part of its expansion case, but the commercial mechanism is conventional channel distribution. QBS Software Africa provides local relationships, sales reach, and support to resellers and MSPs, which in turn sell services to organisations in their markets.
The model allows a security vendor to enter new regions without building a direct sales and support organisation in every country. It also makes local partners more important to the quality of deployment, because customers often experience the vendor through the MSP rather than directly.
That dependency cuts both ways. MSPs can aggregate scarce expertise and make mature security services accessible to smaller organisations, but they also become concentrated points of operational trust. Security vendors selling through them need consistent controls, telemetry, identity governance, and incident escalation across a network of independent providers.
Huntress is also marketing increasing levels of AI-assisted investigation within its platform. Its Athena system is intended to automate portions of investigation while human analysts remain part of the security operations process.
As with other “agentic” security claims, the practical measure will be operational performance rather than the label itself: whether automated investigation reduces response times without creating unacceptable false positives, missed context, or poorly governed actions.
The QBS deal broadens Huntress’ distribution footprint at a point when AI-enabled attack claims are becoming part of both the threat landscape and vendor sales language. Its regional success will depend less on that terminology than on whether local MSPs can deliver consistent security outcomes across organisations with widely differing infrastructure, budgets, and maturity.
