I Got Hacked Last Week—Here’s How Memcyco Could Have Stopped It

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. I'm really excited to introduce you to our next guest.

His name is Israel Mazen. Israel is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Mexico. We're going to hear all about it, but first, let's hear all about Israel.

Israel, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. Thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure.

Israel, I mentioned you're the co-founder and CEO of Mexico, but you know, that's relatively recent. Talk to us kind of about your arc, about, you know, how you got here today. Yeah.

So thank you. I have, uh, me and my team, uh, more than 30 years experience in building software companies, especially in cyber. Uh mm-hmm.

We had companies that were public in the nasdaq. We acquired companies, we did exits, and, uh, actually we came together to, uh, four years ago to, uh, build this, uh, to build Mexico. So, uh, we have, as I said, a long time experience in building worldwide software companies, and this is, uh, why we came back together to the game and, uh, to build another, uh, large independent company.

This is our goal in Mexico. Absolutely. So you got the gang back together?

Yes. Yes. All day.

We have all the founders that we were many years together, uh, we gather back together, yes. Excellent. Um, you know what, as long as you mention them, maybe they're watching this and they'd like to hear their name mentioned.

Who's, who's on the founding team here with you? Okay, so, uh, with me, we have Ellie Maia that we, me is the CTO and the brain. Mm-hmm.

Hmm. Uh, of all the products. Mm-hmm.

I have Gidon Hasam that is also the founder, co-founder, and COO and, uh, customer success, head of customer success, uh, or amazing that my brother also CRO long, long time with us in this, uh, journey. And then, uh, a few other, the join us that working with us 30 years do gal, the CFO also working with us, uh, in the last 30 years, including, uh, public companies, private companies, uh, Zaki that is the head of r and d, all of them working with me in the last 30 years. Beautiful.

You know, as you, like, you, I've, I've also been an entrepreneur 30 plus years. It's a long time. Right.

And, um, I'm mostly in cyber as well, right? Until I, about 10, 12 years, well, almost 13 years ago now, I stopped all that. I started writing and speaking and somehow wound up from a blog became What's Today, text Drunk.

But I also, I surround myself with people that I've worked with, 2025, you know, 30 years. I, I know how that is. But you can't just say, Hey, let's get together.

We'll have, you know, we'll have a couple of drinks and we'll think about what we want to do. There's gotta be a, a problem that calls to you that says, Hey, this is, this is a problem. And it's not just a problem We've seen ourselves.

It's a problem I know other people are having, and let's, let's build something that solves this problem. It's not enough just to build a big company or a successful company that at the heart of it, at its core, there's gotta be some problem that you're passionate about trying to solve for everyone. What, what is that passion?

What is that challenge? At Mexico? This is true.

When we, uh, gather again to do this company, we saw that there are a lot of scams that, uh, around the world that all of us can fail to these scams that actually try to steal your credential, try to scam you in a fake sites, fake social media, social engineering, and actually try to, uh, steal your identity. And then do a lot of stuff like stealing money, stealing goods, stealing, uh, frequent flyers. It depends, but the main thing that we saw that happening significantly also to our family members and friends that trying to actually, uh, get our credential, steal our identity.

Uh, I think that everyone, I believe that you see it, everyone see it happening every, every minute, every second, all over the world. So this was something that we saw and we said how it's, uh, not solved, uh, really in, in good way. So after we understand it, we talked with more than a hundred potential clients to see if they think that they solved it, why they didn't solve it.

And this is what we understand that the current solution that they had before we developed and started to sell our product didn't really solve their issues. They start maybe part of it, maybe give them some insight, but didn't solve the problem. So this is why we gathered again and we said, we must actually solve this problem.

You know, Israel, they say God works in funny ways. Just last week, just last week, friend of mine reaches out and tells me that they got a, a, a funny Instagram message from someone from me. I said, I didn't send you anything.

Well, let me see what you got. Sure enough, they got a, a follow request from a new, a new Instagram account. Shimmel Allen, no picture nothing.

Shimmel dot Allen, I look it up. Sure enough, he is follow or they are following 85 of my friends, they're following, and you know how it works, right? I follow you.

You say, oh, that's Shimel. I'll follow him back. Yeah.

12 of my friends or connections followed him, followed this account back. So I, I reached out to those. The nice thing is on Instagram, I could see who, you know, who followed who.

So I reached out to the ones who followed and I said, Hey, I see you're following this account, Shimel Allen, I want you to know it's not me and you should block and report it, but let me know, did they reach out to you? What's the scam? 'cause this has gotta be a scam, right?

As you said, yes. And sure enough, about half of them had gotten messages once they were following about clicking a link for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Another one was about a book or something.

They all different sort of scams ams, right? With, with the, with the idea is that these people should click links. So they were using me as a trusted source to, to, to really get people who are connected to me.

Now, I wrote to Instagram, you know, I went on Instagram. I said, someone's imitating me. They're imitating me that it's a scam.

You know, you get the automated message back. I'm very sorry, this doesn't violate our community standards. There's nothing you could do.

They gimme a suicide prevention hotline. If I'm that upset about it. I wrote an article last week about it.

These companies don't care meta and, and, and, and Google and what have you. They're not, you know, they talk a good game, but they don't help you when something like this happens. How do you help?

Yeah. When something like this happens, You describe exactly what's happened to many organizations in banks or airlines or retail or hospitality, that you get fake, uh, social media advertisement or profile or fake link to a site that look like the their site. You, and, but it's not, it's a fake.

And actually what they're doing, they get your, uh, actually identity and your credentials, and then they can do a lot of stuff, transfer money, uh, buy a vacation, uh, with your credentials and many other stuff. Uh, steal your credit card number. So this is the man you describe exactly what's happening in many type of vectors, like fake sites, fake social media, fake profile, what we are doing and what we developed, that it's a completely different on the other solution that were in the market.

That we develop a solution that can in real time where to our customers base, uh, that it's, uh, banks, large banks, or retail airlines. Um, so it's give them in real time when it's happened and they send to you as the, their user. Some like fake link like this or fake, uh, social media, whatever we know to detect it in real time.

And even when attackers start to prepare an attack before we attack you, we have a way to, to start detect it. And we put it as an event, an additional event, until we know that it will be an attack for sure. So we can actually alert to our customers, this users can fail to these scams, can be thousand user, 10,000 user, a hundred thousand user or more users.

And then we can, uh, also, uh, protect them by sending fake, uh, credentials to the hacker or they, or, uh, stop their, uh, devices or whatever, uh, that they cannot access, uh, to this account. So, and many other protection capabilities. So our main, uh, difference or advantage that we know to detect it, our solution is, uh, preemptive and in real time, and we can detect all of this, uh, that happening to our customers in real time and, uh, protect the users.

We can, I think, prevent more than 70 or 80% of account takeover that happening to the users of the organizations. Israel, you mentioned you founded Mexico four about four years ago. Yes.

But, uh, recently you guys announced a series a, uh, round of financing, a healthy series, a $37 million. Usually you see a series a, a year, two years, you know, into the company. I'm gonna imagine because of the, the history of you and your team, you kind of bootstrapped itself, funded for, for a couple years before you went out to raise money here.

But anyway, congratulations on the race. Tell us a little bit about who, what, why, why now. Okay.

So yes, we raised 37. Our goal was to waste 25 million, but we had very high demand for the round. So we, uh, increased it to 37.

And, uh, we did it now because we are going, uh, three times year over year in, in our a RR and we want, we will plan to continue growth three times year over year. And, uh, it was the right timing because we planned for the next few years the same growth. So we need to put the infrastructure, uh, expand our sales team, support team, uh, customer success team.

Also, we are planning to developing more and more products on the same platform. So we expand, also expanding our, uh, development and QA team. And so this is, uh, it was the right time for us to raise another round.

Uh, and also the investors that invested first account investors, couple ventures and venture guide that was in the seed round, invested in this round, and the new investors, one of them is our customer, customer of US National Bank of Canada, that they saw the strengths of the product and the company. So they invested the, they actually one of the leader in this round. And then we have, uh, PAG PAGs group that it's, uh, the family office of Steve pca.

It's a guy that end up, uh, is the board of, uh, is in the board of, uh, garner. He's the senior advisory board of Bank Capital. He was the owner of both of Celtics Steel August, very well known that can help us a lot already help us to bring customers and potential partners.

And the other one, it's a very wealthy family with many, many businesses in Latin America and Dominican Republic, uh, the Leon family. And, uh, they can help us. They already introduce us to their businesses and, and potential clients for us.

So it's bringing us not just money, but potential for many more customers. Strategic investors. Yes, Exactly.

Strategic investors. Yes. Yeah, That's excellent.

Excellent, excellent. Um, you know, look, today everybody is with AI and AI and AI and more ai. How is AI changing the game when it comes to digital impersonation, account takeover, fraud, et cetera?

Yes, it's very, uh, very good. Uh, question because what's happening today that with using ai, using AI kits, uh, phishing as a service, scam as a service, what's happening that everyone also almost can do as to these scams? You don't need to be sophisticated hecker, and also you can do a lot of them in very short time because you create them through ai.

So it means that there are many more attacks. I can tell you that the estimation that until, uh, by 27, the aggregate amount of losses from this type of scam as the account take over and Ford will be over $300 billion over the world, it's a huge losses. So the, the, it's changed completely the, because everyone can do today these scams and very fast with ai.

So what we are doing also, and we develop also solution and we continue to develop it, that will know to detect all of these AI scams that coming from, uh, these fish kits or these scam kits or AI generated by AI to detect it immediately and then protect against them. But it's make you much easier to do these scams and much faster. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Um, so I, I wanna make clear, right, your MCO sells enterprise customers, right? Organizations who are susceptible to this.

There's a huge problem, like me as a cons as a single person, as a consumer, any plans maybe to offer something to help people, you know, just regular people, not organizations. Yeah. So for now, we are more B2B uh, player, and, uh, we are selling especially to organizations, but I can tell you that there's more and more organizations will, will use solutions like us and our solution.

So you as a customer will be protected. So let's assume that most of the organization will have something like this, then you'll be protected because, uh, you cannot actually, when you access, you get protected. For now, we are planning to stay in B2B, uh, play.

Yes. Now you guys can do a great job, right? And have a great product.

At the end of the day though, some of the responsibility has to be on the social media, the email providers, the exes, the, the, the Facebook meta, whatever, uh, you know, apple, Google, all of these companies that, that, you know, they, they just don't seem, I mean, they talk a good game, but they, the, the actions don't match the words. Sometimes in, in taking this as a very serious problem, you're in a great spot because you represent, you'll be having all these companies that you, they're customers of yours. You'll maybe have some leverage.

What, what can we do at that, on that side of the equation? Yes. I think to try to make it better.

Yeah. I think first regulators are more and more serious now about it. So they, you'll seek, uh, countries in uk, Europe, now starting in the US Australia, that the regulators will force the organizations to protect their customers.

And if not, they give them penalties and they need to give the money back and penalties. So we see it more and more that regulators are, start being more serious and care about this. Uh, and this is what I think will happen because I think that, uh, to protect the real users, the end users, uh, or regulation, uh, regulators will force the, uh, organizations to protect their users.

And this what will mean that they must, uh, uh, deploy solutions that can protect their users. I think it'll happen more and more, uh, in the next few years. I will tell you in the case with me last week, I don't think they counted on most of my friends being cybersecurity people.

So when they reached out to my friends, my friends saw it was a scam, and they all, you know, did what they had to, they gave 'em a good time about it. But if not, you know, that was me. I, I feel bad for other people.

Yeah. Israel, for companies out here watching this saying, you know what, this is a problem. We'd like to maybe check it out.

What, what's the on-ramp? What's the best way to engage with mem Mexico? Okay, so, uh, we actually, uh, selling directly.

So they can of course contact us through our website. com, all the contacts, you know, they can contact us and they'll get answer immediately. Uh, we have people around the world that's supporting them.

We have channels, uh, that's selling us like Deloitte in emea, in Latin America, local channels in Italy, Spain, Latin America. So, uh, when, if someone want to approach us, we, they can approach us through our contact information on the site, and then someone immediately will be in touch with them. com.

Yes. com. M-E-M-C-Y-C-O.

Very good. Israel, first of all, congratulations on the oversubscribed series. A more you importantly Thank you.

You're welcome. More importantly, look, I could tell from personal, tell you from personal experience, this is a real problem. It's a problem we need to solve.

It's a problem we gotta take seriously. So I, I wish you lots of success, you and the team in solving this problem. Thank you so much.

I, I agree with you and uh, I believe that more and more customers will use our solution and then the customer, the end user will like you and other, will be much more protected and do safer, you know, transactions in the internet. Absolutely. Alright, Israel, ma Israel Mazen, co-founder, CEO of Mexico here on Textron tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back with more in a little bit.