Malanta Emerges from Stealth with $10M to Launch Predictive Pre-Attack Prevention Platform

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv, you know, exciting times. I've got a new company to introduce you to.

Uh, first time guest here who's their CEO and co-founder. His name is, uh, Kobe Benna. I hope I pronounced it right.

Kobe, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you on here. Thank you very much for having me.

Pleasure. So, Kobe, the name of the company is Malta, and we are going to dive into that in just a moment. But first I wanted to give people a sense of who you are and how you came to be the CEO and co-founder here.

Thanks. Thank you. So I had my first startup in 2012.

Uh, we developed an EDR solution even before it was called EDR uhhuh. Uh, we had it for two and a half years, and after that we sold the company to Cyber. Sure.

Uh, over there I served as VP research and innovation for six years. Mm-hmm. And after that, I had a role in the Prime Minister Office here in Israel for three years.

And this is when, uh, we started lanta a year and a half ago. Uh, we started with an idea. The idea was let's find a big problem to solve.

We all of the, uh, uh, Melan founders, uh, we worked together for many years, uh, uh, first at, uh, CyberArk and, and, uh, uh, even, uh, with one of them from the Ministry of Foreign Affair, which was the job I had before, uh, uh, the first startup. So we're working together for many years, and we looked for a very big problem to solve. And after playing with several issues and problems, we decided to focus on the first stages of a cyber attack, the first stages, which the attacker having touched the victim yet.

So this is a very technical issue to solve, and we started with this, uh, with this idea. And after a couple of days that we played with it, we had a very strong POC and we started from there. So this is why we called the company Melan.

Melan in Hebrew. Slang is plenty. We got huge amount of results, and we were overwhelmed with a, a, a richness of the data that we got.

So when we are looking at a company, we start by analyzing their, uh, attack infrastructure, and from there we go to the attacker side and we analyze potential attackers. So we have in our technologies the ability to cluster evil entities, and we start from there. So once we clustered evil entities, we then go and, and see what they actually did over the internet.

Did they bought, bought domains, they have certificates, they have virtual servers, uh, uh, email addresses, social accounts, and so forth. And then we see how this attack infrastructure is correlated with the company that we are protecting on. So this is the, the two things that we started with and the result were overwhelming.

So from the very few weeks, uh, uh, uh, that we started, we had Israel governments as design partner, we have cybersecurity firms as design partners. Uh, and remember, we have a very good reputation in the cyber community here in Israel, all of the founders. So it, it was very natural to work with all of those players.

And we started there and the value that they got from us pushed us forward. So we started by, uh, doing, uh, a small fundraising of 3 million and then further ahead we, uh, added seven, uh, additional millions to it. So overall we have, uh, uh, 10 million, uh, as a seed round.

We have 20 employees. Uh, all of them are located here in Israel. All of them with vast experience in cyber defense and office.

So we have very good talents here. And from that point, we had onboarded around 20 design partners that are now being converted into paying customers. The reactions are quite good so far.

Excellent. Kobe, I feel like your co-founder's mothers would be upset if we didn't mention their names here. Sure.

So if you don't mind, share some of the other co-founding team with us. Of course. So we have Guy Beye, which I worked with together for the past 20 years.

Uh, we have tile candle and we have antes. Okay. Very cool.

That's a nice team. Um, let's talk Kobe, if you don't mind, let's talk a little bit about, as you call it, pre attack prevention right? Before, before damage is done.

Right. And, and look, I, look, I've been in security 25 plus years myself. Before it was called cyber.

I got involved in 1998. Uh, first insecurity, managed checkpoint firewalls. Um, we oftentimes, the, the, the damage doesn't happen till days, weeks, months later from the initial infiltration or the initial thing.

And, and back then, look, we put all of our eggs in the prevention basket, very little in the resilience or response basket. But when we looked at pre attack, right? Different time, right?

You had to moat and castle. We, we would hopefully be able to see something when it hit a route or a firewall or sweat, you know, something at that edge, if you will. Today, of course, with the cloud, with, with everybody's on every device, wherever they are.

We don't have an edge anymore. We don't have, I don't know if you remember the Jericho project that was called, right? The de parameterization of security.

We don't have a perimeter. How, how can you stop a pre, you know, pre attack prevention when we don't have a, we don't have a, a defensive line to, to fight at. Yeah.

So I think we start with the understanding that the coin security stack is not relevant because at the attacker side, you have AI attackers and AI attackers are AI agents that are trained to attack. So if a past attack took weeks to develop an a, a, a, a victim network to understand all the relationship between, uh, all of endpoints as a target, uh, destination, now it takes, so once an AI attacker decided he's attacking you till your breach takes minutes. So if you have human in the security stacks, both in the vendor side and the the defender side, you are not relevant.

You're not fast enough, you are not accurate enough, and you are reacting to past events. We need to shift this paradigm and to understand that in order to fight AI attackers, you have to have a human free security stack. So this is the first premise you can bring a knife into a gun fight.

So in our solution, there are zero human uh, involvement. So we are fast enough and we can run in very big scales in order to fight the AI attackers. So this is the first premise.

And of course, you still need to have the internal controls. You still need to have firewalls, you still need to have sock, uh, uh, in order to defend events that you are currently tackling. But in order to fight the pre attack stage, you must have the ability to look at the attacker side.

And this is the big, the big news that we're bringing the ability to find attackers to uncover their entire attack chain. Uh, uh, to give you an example, an attack chain is built from the operation room of the attacker. Then they have several servers, proxies, uh, uh, or other mechanism to keep them away to as far away from the victim.

And then on the other side, you have the, uh, CNC servers, you have the phishing servers, you have the vulnerability servers, and the attacker taking consideration that those assets will force. And he's preparing for that. But the way that we are un, the, the attacker cluster, we see the entire check.

So when we take down an attacker infrastructure, it's taking down everything. So it's very hard for an attacker to overcome this take down. Got it.

Got it. You know what, it's an AI powered world. And, and I've said this before, we, we need AI to fight ai.

Right. Especially as this scales up. Mm-hmm.

Um, so product is available now. You got about 20 customers. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, are they mostly based in Israel? Any here in North America?

Uh, Europe, anywhere else in the world? North America, we have us, we have, uh, Canadian companies, we have from Europe. Uh, of course we have many from Israel and even from far Australia.

Ah, that's good. And, and now look, you got this money, I assume some of it'll be used for marketing and, and outreach. What are, what are plans like go to market plans?

Okay, so as you mentioned, of course marketing and, uh, building the, the, the sale department, okay? Mm-hmm. For now, all of the sale efforts are coming from us as the founders.

We believe that founder passion is the best seller. So we start by examining the playbook to understand what is working, what is not working, and then we'll onboard salesperson. So this is regarding the, the marketing and sales.

And of course, heavily invest in technology. You have to build more modules, you have to build more, uh, capabilities and sure. It's, it's a cat mouse spread, right?

So you have keep innovating all the time. What about, you know, and, you know, look, when I was started, my own security companies, the same thing. We started off family and friends, then founder selling, we brought in sales teams.

The world's different. Now. People like to get their hands on software and they try it, they taste it before they pay for it.

Right? Any plans on, I, I don't know if you're offering now like a free trial, a free downloadable, maybe a small, you know, it's limited in some way, but, uh, like how, how can people get their hands on Melan and see for themselves here? So I, I think a, as you mentioned, we really don't like a, a software that you need to push yourself in order to get a POC to get a a, a initial value.

So in mal, you only register the, uh, the software and you get it within minutes, just your email verification link. And that's it. Less than one minute to volume, Really.

And how hard is it then to, you know, get up and running? Well, we heavily invested in the infrastructure. As I mentioned.

We are all coming from CyberArk, which is a great school. Mm-hmm. Uh, uh, and we learn about enterprise readiness software.

So in my first startup, we were like Indians running back and forth right and left. Uh, um, but after doing the CyberArk, uh, uh, university, we understand that a product must have a, a basic maturity in order to work with enterprises. So we heavily invested in the product.

Excellent. You know what, we didn't mention Kobe, the website. Yeah.

So you can get all of the information about the risks that we are tackling, the, uh, real what is real preemptive security, not just reaction. And you can get over there all the information that you need. Learn about the staff, the team, and get A-A-P-O-C within less than a minute.

ai. Yeah. M-A-L-A-N-T-A ai.

Yeah. Well, Kobe, I wish you mazeltov a lot of success with Melan. I'm sure we'll be hearing more in their days and weeks and months to come.

Please come back and keep us posted. Thank you very much and for having me. All right.

Kobe Ben, IM CEO co-founder Melan here on Tech Drunk tv. ai. Check it out.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back with more. Stay tuned.