2022 VC SurveyIsraeli Cybersecurity startups to watch out for in 2023
2022 VC Survey
Israeli Cybersecurity startups to watch out for in 2023
As part of CTech's 2022 VC survey, we asked dozens of industry executives to name some startups they invested in over the past year. The following list highlights some of the notable Cybersecurity startups suggested by their investors
The pandemic showed everyone how important cybersecurity was for the protection of enterprises and personal devices during work. Access points increased, attack surfaces grew, and hackers were finding new ways to attack companies.
As part of the “2022 VC Survey” series we conducted last year to review 2022 and make predictions for 2023, we contacted dozens of the leading funds in Israel and asked them to name three startups that deserve attention in the coming year. Each VC manager was asked to present relatively new startups in their portfolio, or ones that operate a little under the radar, and explain why they decided to invest in these companies.
The list we compiled includes over 100 startups from various fields such as Cybersecurity, Cloud+Data, AI, Quantum Computing, Medtech, Fintech, Mobility, and more. Here is the list of startups that you should pay attention to in the field of Cybersecurity:
Dig Security
Cloud data security: Dig Security helps organizations discover, classify, protect, and govern their cloud data. With organizations shifting to complex environments with dozens of database types across clouds, monitoring and detecting data exfiltration and policy violations have become a complex problem with limited fragmented solutions. Dig's cloud-native and completely agentless approach re-invents cloud DLP with DDR (Data Detection & Response) capabilities to help organizations better cope with cloud data sprawl.
Founders: Dan Benjamin, CEO and Co-Founder; Ido Azran, VP R&D, Co-Founder; Gad Akuka, CTO and Co-Founder
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 40 employees
Explanation behind Team8’s investment:
It's rare to meet a founding team who have both an insider view of cloud security challenges from within Microsoft and Google's cloud organizations, alongside the experience of founding successfully acquired security companies. Dig's active approach, bringing detection and response to data in the cloud, is precisely what the market needs. Data security in the cloud is high on the priority list of most CISOs today and we're proud to invest in the company we believe will lead this category.
Dig Security is shaping the future of multi-cloud data security by providing a real-time threat detection solution for data assets hosted in public clouds. The company harnesses native cloud technologies to provide an out-of-band solution to help organizations discover, monitor, detect and govern their data through a single unified policy engine.
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Eclypsium
Cyber Protection for Firmware and Supply Chain
Founders: Yuriy Bulygin
Founding year: 2017
Number of employees: +70
Explanation behind J-Ventures Group’s investment: Most of cyber goes to software, but the hardware infrastructure companies use could risk them if not identified and protected.
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Polar Security
Polar Security’s unique technology automatically maps and follows data and data flows and provides deep visibility and protection across your cloud-native data assets to prevent data vulnerabilities and compliance violations.
Founders: Guy Shanny, Roey Yaacovi
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 34 (according to LinkedIn)
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Armo Security
The Open Source Kubernetes Security Platform - from development to production, configuration to runtime – built for DevOps teams.
Founders: Leonid Sandler, Shauli Rozen, Ben Hirschberg
Founding year: 2019
Number of employees: 40
Explanation behind Hypewise Ventures’ investment:
The first and only open-source Kubernetes end-to-end security platform built by security experts and experienced a hyper-growth in community adoption.
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Liminal Security (stealth)
End-to-end secrets management, security, and compliance
Founders: Itzik Alvas and Adam Cheriki
Founding year: 2022
Number of employees: 8
Explanation behind Hypewise Ventures’ investment:
The first holistic approach that solves a high-demand security problem around secrets by passionate and dedicated founders who experienced it first-hand during their previous jobs.
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Silverfort
Cybersecurity/Detection & Response: Silverfort has developed the first Unified Identity Protection Platform - a single solution that aggregates and analyzes all user authentication activity across all resources. Using Silverfort’s platform, enterprises are able to gain holistic visibility across the board, perform continuous risk analysis of user behavior, and apply protection across all assets (on-prem and cloud).
Founders: Hed Kovetz, Co-Founder & CEO; Yaron Kassner, Co-Founder & CTO
Founding Year: 2016
Number of Employees: 151
Explanation behind Greenfield Partners’ investment:
Organizations and enterprises in the past years have evolved to accommodate hybrid work models, shifting assets from on-premises to the cloud, presenting a slew of difficulties in handling sensitive assets.
Silverfort’s Unified Identity Threat Protection Platform is the first solution that secures organizations by taking in the full telemetry of identity-based activity across identity stores.
The platform integrates with all existing IAM solutions, and continuously monitors access of all users and service accounts across both cloud and on-premise environments, analyzing risk in real-time using an AI-based engine, and enforcing adaptive authentication and access policies.
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Neosec
Neosec provides a SaaS platform that unifies security and development teams to protect modern applications from threats.
Founders: Co-Founder & CEO, Giora Engel; Co-Founder & CTO, Ziv Sivan
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 50+ employees
Explanation behind TLV Partners’ investment:
There is a tidal wave of products being served via APIs. These APIs are becoming more complex and critical to company operations. Therefore, a security product that protects APIs from abuse and misuse is crucial.
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Veriti
Unified security posture management platform
Founders: Adi Ikan, Oren Koren
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 20
Explanation behind Amiti Ventures’ investment:
Founders who approached a problem they had vast experience with, solving a problem that also every organization faces
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Astrix
Astrix Security is the first access management solution for third-party app integrations. The rapid increase of app integrations and automation processes has reshaped the modern IT environment into a tangled web of app-to-app connectivity – expanding organizations’ third-party attack surface at an ever-increasing rate. With agentless, one-click deployment, Astrix enables security teams to instantly see through the fog of connections, and detect redundant, misconfigured, and malicious third-party exposure to their critical systems – enabling their business to unleash the power of integrations and automation while seamlessly controlling their security and compliance.
Founders: Alon Jackson, Idan Gour
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 30
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Zenity
Governance and Security for Low-Code/No-Code Applications
Founders: Ben Kliger, Michael Bargury
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 20
Explanation behind UpWest’s investment:
We met the founders very early in their journey and were immediately drawn to their passion and knowledge of this domain. We saw that as organizations are continuously increasing their reliance on low-code application development in order to shorten development cycles and free up valuable human capital resources, this creates new attack vectors and new risks. We are excited to be part of the team’s journey from day one.
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Hunters
Hunters is a modern SOC platform that is built on a modern data infrastructure and uses machine learning to automatically correlate, investigate and prioritize incidents, empowering security teams to identify and respond to incidents in real-time and in a manner that is much more cost-effective and scalable than traditional SIEMs.
Founders: Uri May, Tomer Kazaz
Founding year: 2018
Number of employees: 154
Explanation behind DTCP (Growth)’s investment:
As technology advances and more tools are being used, the attack surface becomes larger and more sophisticated. Companies are constantly challenged to be prepared to see the full picture of the threat landscape and respond to incidents in a quick and effective manner. That puts a significant load on the security teams, where there is an enormous talent shortage in the industry. SIEMs have been the center of operations for security teams, but they weren’t designed to effectively manage the complexity, volume, and scale of the threat landscape seen today. Hunters alleviates the pain of traditional SIEMs, which is often costly, complex, and time-consuming, with advanced automated correlation and threat-hunting capabilities built on top of modern data infrastructure. Hunters is not only flexible enough to augment a SIEM but also powerful enough to fully replace it.
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CyberPion
Cyberpion solves the rising cybersecurity challenge of understanding the risks and vulnerabilities of your connected online assets that form an external attack surface.
Founders: Nathaniel Gelernter, Marc Gaffan, Ori Engelberg
Founding year: 2016
Number of employees: 60
Explanation behind Israeli Mapped Ventures’ investment:
We decided to invest in Cyberpion due to the fact that it is the only External Attack Surface Management (EASM) platform that discovers the full extent of an enterprise's online exposure to risk and actively prevents attacks that arrive from the direct and indirect digital supply-chain.
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Talon
Secure Enterprise Browser: Talon Cyber Security delivers the industry’s leading secure enterprise browser. Talon’s enterprise browser is a first line of defense for customers, delivering native features like authentication, data loss prevention, and Zero Trust controls.
Founders: Ofer Ben-Noon and Ohad Bobrov
Founding year: 2021
Number of employees: 80
Explanation behind Israeli Mapped Ventures’ investment:
The way that work is done has rapidly changed around us. In today’s world of SaaS applications, hybrid work, and the use of third-party workers, the browser has become the main workspace for enterprises. Talon’s mission of delivering security through the browser addresses the challenges that come with these new ways of conducting business, and the company has an incredible opportunity to change and improve security programs for modern enterprises. The team has extensive experience from the previous company that was acquired (Argus).
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Ofer Ben-Noon speaking with James Spiro
Seemplicity
Application Security. Seemplicity helps better protect organizations against ongoing security threats by accelerating security teams’ response rate to vulnerabilities, application security issues, and misconfigurations. Seemplicity's automated workflow platform integrates with dozens of existing security products across the organization, uses machine learning and big data analytics to normalize countless alerts into a manageable set of actionable tasks, and automatically prioritizes, distributes, and assigns these tasks to the right remediation teams (R&D, IT, AppSec, etc.) on their own native ticketing and workflow systems (e.g. Jira, monday.com, ServiceNow, etc.). As a result, remediation time of security issues is shortened by as much as 6x.
Founders: Yoran Sirkis, Ravid Circus, and Rotem Cohen-Gadol
Founding year: 2020
Number of employees: 38
Explanation behind Glilot+’s investment:
Modern AppSec and vulnerability assessment tools are providing warnings and alerts across the infrastructure, flooding security and R&D teams with information that may be in many cases duplicated or obscure, in turn creating security debts and at times leading to actual breaches. This problem is exacerbated in the current macro environment, in which teams are encouraged to do more with less and cut costs. By creating smart automated workflows from cybersecurity findings and generating specific R&D or configuration tasks for remediation teams, Seemplicity can fix security issues and shorten time-to-resolution, greatly improving security team efficiency and productivity.
Thanks to Glilot’s vast network of CISOs and security expert advisors, we were able to quickly gather feedback on the validity and need for Seemplicity’s solution. The unanimously positive feedback on the team and offering made the investment an easy decision.
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