Cyera’s Business Momentum with Yotam Segev

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alex Hum here for another Textron TV interview. Our next guest is a first time guest here on Techron tv.

It think it's the first time we've covered the company on on techron tv. I want to introduce you all to Yotam Sev. Yotam is the, uh, co-founder and CEO of a company called Say Yotam.

Welcome to Techstrong tv. It's great to have you on, man. Thank you for having me.

Pleasure, pleasure to be here. So, Yotam, before we even get into say, and what we want to talk about today, let's hear a little bit about yo top. What, what's, give us your story.

I'm a cyber guy and fell in love in cyber, uh, with cyber at a young age. Met my co-founder, met my co-founder and my partner in the company back in 2010. We've been running, uh, side by side sense.

Most of our experience came from the Israeli intelligence and working in, uh, some of the cyber operations there. And in the last, uh, four years, we've been building an amazing company, uh, called Good For You in the data security space, headquartered in New York, and, uh, really changing the way data security is being done in enterprises across the US and across the globe. I love it.

I love it. I'm a cyber guy myself. I've been in cyber a long time, 25 plus years in, in cyber nine, late nineties.

Of course, we didn't call it cyber then. It was called InfoSec. And for good reason, for good reason.

And protecting the information is back in fashion. Yeah, it took a while, but you know, that wheel goes round and round. Right.

And eventually it comes around. So you're based in New York now? Yep.

Yep. I'm in New York right now, and the center of the, the center of the world's economy. Well, if you couldn't tell from my French accent, I'm, I'm a New Yorker, born and raised, and like many New Yorkers though, I moved outta Florida about 20 years ago.

And, uh, but New York's still home for me, so it's always good to see more New York companies and more people in New York. Um, so you mentioned you got, you and your co-founder. You both came from Jose 8,200 or, you know, Israeli cyber.

And, uh, about four years ago you founded Sayer. Yep. Coming up at four years, 400 people today, 3 billion valuation in our last funding ground and working with some of the world's, uh, most meaningful enterprises.

Absolutely. You know, over the years I've met a lot of co, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders. I, I founded three or four venture backed companies, myself, co-founded.

No, you gotta be a little crazy co-founder company. You, you gotta have like a, a passion, but somehow what you are doing is gonna make the world in, even if it's in a small way, is gonna make the world better. What was the passion that drove you for say, I think for us, the answer is so easy, right?

Uh, we, we, you see what's happening in the world today. You see the way data, personal information, trade secrets, intellectual property, you know, walk walks of art, if you will, uh, are being, uh, are being manipulated, being exposed. I think when we look back on this day and age, we will say that we lived in the age of data bism, right?

Uh, where we took very little care of data. I think that in 20 years from now, data will be accounted for in a very similar manner to currency. The way we have accounting firms that are accounting for spend and income and, you know, are able to close the books and report supposedly on every dollar.

I think the data as it becomes more valuable for people and for organizations, is going to be treated in a very similar way. And you just think about how far we are from that. And you realize that the journey we have to all make as an industry and as a society.

And that's where Ciera is really, you know, ushering in the, the awareness to data, the responsibility for data, and the ability for enterprises to take ownership of this weird intangible asset that they have so much of. And start by being able to inventory it, discover and classify the huge quantities of data they've amassed over the, their company's life. And once you, you have that inventory, you are actually able to start to take ownership, to take responsibility and uh, and to get the full value unlocked.

Absolutely. You know, we, we've seen this in, in security the last few years, right? You, you can't protect what you don't know.

You have, we've seen it with APIs, right? Everything runs via API I today, but if you don't know what APIs you have and what their settings are, how, how, how can you secure your APIs? We, we, we've seen it with assets, not just data, but there are a lot of companies that don't even know what assets they have out there.

Whether it's in the cloud or in a data center, or hanging here on the edge. You again, you can't protect what you don't know you have. Exactly.

With data, it's always been this, right? For, for a long time we got so focused on app security, AppSec, AppSec, AppSec, that we, we, we seem to have lost focus that it's about the data. Stupid, right?

It's data is the jewels. Yep. And that brings us back to information security, right?

Like chief information security officer. Yeah. Info sec man.

That's where it's at. The info security, you know, that's Where we started. And, and I, you know, I was just in Vegas last week for, uh, reinvent for Amazon Reinvent AWS reinvent.

And you know, we hear about S3 and the buckets data buckets, data lakes data and the, and the, so much of the emphasis is on, we could store your data cheap, right? You've got so much data and you're generating more data. There's only one solution here.

We gotta do it cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. We gotta find the cheapest way to store all of this data. But in doing, you know, sometimes the cheapest way is not the most secure way.

Yeah. And you think about it, right? Like think about the data centers we used to have as a garage.

Mm-hmm. Like a lot of people pile up a lot of junk in their garage, right? Like I do.

You probably do. I do too. Yeah.

You know, It's, it's human nature. We all like to hold a bit. Mm-hmm.

And the garage has one advantage. It's got four walls. It's limited.

It doesn't grow and grow and grow and grow. And when you think about the cloud and how the cloud has changed that now the garage is extensible. Yes.

Not only is it extensible, Amazon and Microsoft and Google are more than happy for you to pile up more junk in there and they'll send you the bill at the end of the month. Just, uh, make sure you pay it. Absolutely.

So one of the, but you Can't figure out the bill. That's what they're good at. The bill's very sophisticated.

But anyway, go ahead. Yeah. One of the things we're seeing that CISOs are doing and leveraging our software, it's not only to improve the security of the data, but it's to drastically reduce the attack surface.

And with that, reduce the cloud cost because the cloud cost is not only big, but it's growing sometimes 50% year over year. And the co the companies just don't have budget for that. So they have to find ways to operationalize data lifecycle management programs.

And that's part of the value proposition of the player platform. It's to be able to fight back the cost, to be able to reduce the attack surface, to be able to identify your crown jewels and make sure they're protected in all the different ecosystems they live on premise in cloud, in SaaS, on the endpoint, wherever they reside. And to be able to drive your operational data security program, whether that's DLP or, uh, programs for investigation and inside the risk to make sure that, you know, and you have full accountability for how your crown jewels, how the most important information your company has is being accessed and is being used.

I get it. You know, I think, I think part and parcel of this too is also the recognition that not all data is created equal. Right?

There is, I mean, you know, just because it's 56 megabytes over here and 56 megs, over 56 megs over here doesn't mean they're equal 56. Yeah. And data, there's data that matters and there's data that flattens, right?

Right. And the ability to differentiate between them, that's the core of the classification capability that say uses a iPhone. It's to be able to say, what is the data and what is its value, right?

Like, is this data that you need to protect is this data that you don't need to protect? And that makes a huge, huge, huge difference when you look at the, the ability to operationalize data security. Agreed.

So let me ask a question. You say you s uses ai right? To, to help classify that data.

Are you talking like generative ai, machine-based learning ai? What, what do you mean by that? So today we, we are calling it compound ai.

Compound AI means that when you look to actually solve a problem, a hard problem within the enterprise, it's not one magical LLM that is going to just, uh, you know, uh, whip the problem, the, the problem away. You need to engineer a lot of different, uh, controls, a lot of different mechanisms in order to get to something that walks, walks at the enterprise scale and, and is really able to deliver results. So AI is at the heart of our ability to classify data automatically, but it's not the only mechanism we use.

And it's compounded with many other mechanisms like traditional machine learning NLP, in order to get the results that our customers are looking for. What our customers expect from Ciena and what we're delivering for them is a fully automated data classification engine. So they don't have to tell us what data to look for.

They don't have to tell us what that data looks like. We can create a very high fidelity, high precision signal on all the data structured and unstructured in the enterprise automatically. And that requires a ton of engineering.

We have over 50 people today in the engineering group that is focused just on this aspect of the classification. And that's a team that is continuing to go and, uh, mature the, the engine that's driving our classification. Absolutely.

Yotam. Let's talk a little bit about data and identity. I think that once we answered the fundamental big question for our customers of what and where is all of my sensitive data, that was the first question they set us after.

The second question they asked us is, who can access it? And in order to answer that question, you have to instrument the identity playing. You have to be able to understand all of the human and non-human identities across the vast myriad of systems, SharePoint and AWS and Snowflake and Databricks and Mongo, and an on-prem file share and an on-prem database, and be able to extract all of the identities form those systems and then correlate it back to the data and really be able to answer the question, who can access what data across the entire enterprise?

And that is ciara's unique capability in the identity space. And you couple that with identity governance aspects, like which of these identities are third party identities? Which of these identities are stale identities?

Nobody's logged in in three months. Which of these identities, uh, you know, are high risk identities, they're being logged onto for many different platforms. And you can couple those things together and really identify the most dangerous, most risky blast radius for your organization from a data perspective.

Love it. Yeah. I wanna come back to stay a little bit, if it's okay.

So you mentioned $3 billion valuation in your last round. That last round was for $300 million Series D funding. So first of all, congratulations, that's a lot of money to raise.

That's a high valuation. Um, you guys have raised almost $760 million, so you could do the math right, at a 3 billion valuation, right? What, what is that go to?

But you also made a recent acquisition of, uh, trail security. That was why, why, what, what, what, what you like about trail security? Yeah.

So let, lemme tie all of that together. So I think that all of these things are, are tied together. I think what the market expects from CI is to consolidate and simplify beta security.

And that's a lot of things that we need to do that we don't yet do today for our customers. And I think that our mission is to be able to deliver a comprehensive, unified data security platform that will be the place where enterprises build, operate, investigate every aspect of the data security program. That's our mission to be able to bring that into one unified platform.

And that requires a lot of innovation, a lot of development, a lot of new product. So the funding acquisition, they're all coming to serve this purpose. We've been doing DSPM for the last three years with immense success.

I think our product in DSPM is the most exciting product in the market today. But that was not enough. We had to expand into the DLP space in order to start to create this data security platform that the customers want from us.

And the acquisition of TRAIL allowed us to jumpstart our entrance into the DLP space and start to deliver BLP capabilities very quickly and support our customers, not just on discovering classification and data security, posture management, but also on the DLP front. How they really building preventative controls around the data that matters. And how are they, uh, managing to operationalize the data security programs, not just to gain the visibility that they never had, but to really turn that visibility into security controls and security protections that they need There.

I, um, you know, it's funny, I hear you talking about DLP, right? So DLP had its day for a while there, right? One of my good friends was the Gartner Analyst for DLP for years in the early two thousands, but ultimately in that iteration, right?

Early mid two thousands, DLP just, it didn't, it didn't work, for lack of a better term. It just didn't work. Why is it work now?

And it didn't work that The biggest challenge with DLP was the ability to differentiate between the data that matters, the data that clutters, and then to understand what is the appropriate behavior for the data that matter. And that is where DSPM changes the whole equation. And that's why DSPM and DLP belong together.

DSPM allows you to understand your data in ways that just weren't possible before, right? Like, this is the way that people today really contextualize and understand data and it's game changing with the ability to use ai. Not just to say, what is the data, but whose data is it?

Is it synthetic or is it real? Does it belong here? Or does it not belong here?

So these things are, are incredible and they're game changing. And that is the foundation that was missing for BLP. If you think about it, in every program we've ever built in security, we always started with an inventory that was always ground zero.

But we never had that inventory for data until DSPM came along. Now, with that inventory that we're generating with DSPM, we can actually operationalize DLP and get to, to a place where zero trust is, is achieved de facto. And that's an incredible, incredible value proposition for customers.

That's the reason we're seeing such acceleration in the market. I love it. Yo, Tom, we're about outta time.

You know what I, so one thing I've always tell people this, you could almost tell how successful a company will be by how much passion their founders have when they talk about it. And I could tell your passion comes through loud and clear here. So man, that that's a good sign and it's a good o and continued success with Sari.

Come back. Keep us posted here. Right?

Because My passion, my passion is fueled by the customers. I know how painful the challenges they're dealing with are. I know how difficult it is to protect an organization's data today.

And I'm hearing that from every practitioner I talk to every day. And I know that we can do better. I know that we can change that reality.

I know that we can bring a new reality in where data is protected well and is accounted for well, and it's possible today. And that's the vision that I'm so excited about. And, you know, so excited to see so many amazing companies, customers partner with us on that journey and nearly step up and say, we're gonna take accountability and we're gonna take ownership of our data and we're gonna make sure that we are protecting it.

Like it should be protected. Excellent, man. All right.

Thank you. Yo Tom, continued success. Oh, you know what?

We didn't mention the website. That's important. Yes.

Us. That's important. Tell us.

T-Y-E-R-A. Dot io. T io.

Io. Yep. New age.

All righty. Yeah, say io. Check it out.

Stay tuned. Tuned. We got more coming today.

Yo, Tom, thank you very much. You're watching Touch Strong TV.