Series A Funding for Non-Human Identity Security – Alon Jackson, Astrix Security

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back to Textron tv.

I've got a, a first time c e o here on our Textron TV audience. He's never appeared before. I want to introduce you to Alon Alon Jackson.

Jackson, excuse me. My voice is a little tough today. Alan Alon is the c o and co-founder of Asterisk Security.

Excuse me, Alan, it's a pleasure to have you on and welcome to Text on tv. Thanks for having me here, Alan, and Alan and Alon is a kind of a similar, although everybody just calls me Jackson, so it's all right. All right, well, look, we'll do Jackson if you want, man.

Action. Jackson Alon Jackson. So, Alon, you know what, let's start with you.

Yeah. Our audience is a, this is a case of first impression. Give our audience a little bit of who Ellan Jackson is.

Yeah. So as a, a lot of Israeli founders started my journey at Day 200, um, maybe different than a lot of Israeli founders spent there over, uh, 12 years there. So left as a major in a very, very long army career at, uh, at the, the military, Israeli military, and amazing place, uh, you know, creates amazing tech, but also amazing friends and, uh, partners.

Um, so I met my co-founder Idan there. Um, we've known each other for 15 years now. Idan was also over a decade at, um, at eight 200.

Um, you know, we fought the worst together with the keyboards and did a lot of stuff, um, then moved, you know, to, to, to out to the private sector. So I was at Argus Arg was the first automotive cybersecurity company. Um, basically, you know, hacking into cars and then trying to fix it, uh, was an amazing exit there.

So to big, uh, German company. Um, so really managing the team over there. And my co-founder was in, uh, deep instinct.

Um, uh, the company does, uh, machine learning based endpoint protection. Um, so we both, uh, really felt a lot and learned a lot from the, uh, private sector before, uh, building our own, our own thing. Um, yeah, really started it about, uh, two years ago, um, almost two years and just raised our A round recently.

Excellent. Excellent. Um, well, before we get into the A round, and I want to talk about it as we were talking off camera, Alon, every founder, co-founder, entrepreneur that I've interviewed and, and that I've worked with over the last 25, 30 years, felt in some ways, in some way what they were doing, what they were building.

It was in some way gonna make the world better, was gonna make someone's job easier, was gonna make it safe or more secure in the case of security. But it was important. What they were doing was important.

You don't know if entrepreneurs raised their hand and say, oh, what I do is not important. What they do is important. What was that driver for you and your co-founder with Asterisk that you felt it was, it was so important you had to start this company?

Yeah, so I think for us, first of all, before, you know, the essence of, of what you do is just building a business, right? Um, and building a place where people can come and, you know, um, are motivated to bring the best of themselves and enjoy the workspace, and have a good culture of a place where you want to work, and a place where you want to, uh, um, believe that this is how organizations should work and should be, uh, built from the ground up. That's an immense opportunity.

And, you know, that's a huge thanks for, you know, our employees. Um, of course my founder, our backup, the VCs that are found that back us up. This is, you know, a huge opportunity even, you know, before we talk exactly about what we are doing, right?

Um, so that's just, just a kind of in on the meta, uh, side of things, and then really looking at the ambition with asterisk. So it's really enabling everyone to use different apps, different tools that are really helping us on a daily basis, right? Lately, everything is all about ai, and we have all these generative AI tools rushing into not only the enterprise, also into our personal life, right?

So really enabling people to be more productive, um, instead of, you know, uh, kind of old fashioned security of saying no, right? You can't use that. You can't do that.

So in our personal life, we have, you know, uh, these apps on our mobile phone that are asking to access our private messages and photos, and we're like, okay, why does this new app need to read all my private messages on the corporate level? We have thousands of apps, they're interacting with each other, right? Um, no one really has grasp what's going on there.

Um, and we got for non-human identities, right? These are non-human entities, usually external, that are connecting to our core systems in the organization. And as I said, ai, so artificial intelligence, right, is another form of non-human, um, uh, a non-human entity, right, that is really kind of crushing and a big, uh, tailwind, uh, to what we're doing these days.

Sure is, sure is. So, look, it, it's true. This AI is, you can't walk three steps without tripping over it.

Um, but, you know, how long have you guys been working on what's become asterisk security, though? Yeah, so it took, it took quite a no nice amount of time working in the Tel Avva garage, uh, together, um, talking, you know, over a hundred security professionals trying to pinpoint what is both unique and important. And that's kind of the sweet spot for startups, right?

So I want to find if it's just unique, right? And it's not important, so you can't really do anything with it. On the other side, it's just important, but they're not unique.

So, you know, you can just search it on Google and find a hundred different, uh, other solutions. So finding something that it's both unique and important, and you know what, we'll also just grow in time, right? And the fact that they say AI rush kind of came in just in the last half a year, is part of this, right?

Our understanding that the world is going to be more and more programmable. Everything is gonna be more and more connected to everything via APIs. And, you know, it's, it's kind of, it, it may be hard to say that human machines are gonna hate the world, right?

They're outnumbering humans. We need to manage them. And we have so many tools to manage user identity or humans identity, right?

But we've got nothing today to manage non-human identity, right? And the security industry is gonna an immense way in the last 20 years, even more 30 years, to deal with identity as a fundamental stepping stone for everything, right? But practically nothing to deal with machines and apps, services, and now ai, um, and really manage these kind of entities just like we managed users.

Sure. You know, there was an old baseball, uh, executive from what, 50 years ago who said that luck was, uh, 80% inspiration, 20% perspiration, right? And so when someone could look and say, oh, they got very lucky, AI really burst on the scene just in time for them.

But it really is about understanding what this current state of technology is and what's coming down. You could foresee that the, you know, AI is not a new concept. The popularity since chat, G P T and, and generative of ai, of course has blown up.

But this has been something that's been a long time coming too. So being in the right place at the right time is, is a result of understanding the environment and the, and the world around us. Um, Absolutely.

So machine identity is something, right? And especially, look, we have cyber companies that specialize in iot machines, right? Internet of things, kind of machines.

We have companies that specialize in, like, uh, for instance, certificates for, for containers, right? So modern applications have dozens, if not hundreds of containers. Every one of those containers has to have a unique identity.

And you've gotta be able to, to prove that this container is in fact that you need a certificate or something. How does asterisk work in there? Yeah.

Yeah. So that's a great question. Um, I think the machine identity is a bit different from the modern way that things work, right?

So the cloud environments enabled us to spun up everything as a service very, very easily. Everyone, you know, with a new idea can actually build a new SaaS product. And everything is as a service, doesn't have to be SaaS, right?

Um, it could be AI as a service platform, as a service database, as a service. Everything today is as a service. And this is very, very easy to use and connect, right?

So when we talk about machines, and like you said, we have certificates and stuff like that. So you had to have an it, you had to have an engineer to come and configure, right? The network, the credentials for something to actually connect, right?

Um, with each other. For a machine, to talk with another machine. These days, it just become so easy.

We have, you know, a click of a button, click on send, right? And now we just granted a new third party vendor, actually, right? A new service to actually, you know, connect another service, another database, your email, your calendar, your crm, wherever it may be, and provide you value, right?

So when we talk about machines, we usually talk, think about the DCP layer, right? The kind of it or more kind of engineering things, right? And when we talk about application to application, we're talking at, you know, a higher level of the, um, um, communication staff, right?

And this is where every employee in the organization actually connecting, doesn't have to be technical at all, right? Just click the button. We actually call it consent fatigue, right?

Just click consent. You need to get the job done. Next, next, next.

It's, uh, you know, the latest and greatest tool. Your friend is using it, you wanna try it out too. And so, you know, now there's a new thing that actually is connecting and reading all your emails.

And that's, that's kind of how this resonates with the machine identity space. Absolutely. You know, we had a, we had a thing here in our own office, right?

One of our salespeople, we were on a Zoom meeting and I said to someone, Hey, we should record the Zoom meeting cuz we wanna replay this. Yep. She said, don't worry, I'm using, and I'm not gonna mention the name of the product.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm using this product. I said, and it's great, it summarizes, and it records and it emails everyone on the meeting.

And I said, oh, you don't send that to me. I'd like to look at it. So I look at it a lot, and it does, it does everything she said it does.

But what it really is, and oh, and, and by the way, it's free. It's free course, right? Course doesn't cost none.

Of course, of course, of course. It's always Free. It's always free.

And I look at it, and what it really is doing is it's sucking all of your contact info. It's taking all of that, you know, it recorded your Zoom meeting for you, but really now it has a transcript, it has that zoom meeting. Who are they selling that to out the back door, right?

Plus, you know, mailing summaries to the, to the meeting attendees. Who else is getting the summaries? Yep.

I mean, this is, but we don't, you know, I, I saw a podcast recently. What's in that ula, you know, people don't read their stuff. They don't even think about it.

They just, like you said, they hit Connect. It's easy connect alarm's using it must be good. He was in 8,200 Connect.

And, and then here we go, you know, then, then this stuff hits the fan. Amazing. Alan, I think you, you can join the team as our, our newest sales rep.

Yeah, exactly. Well, if this don't work out, maybe I'll come, you're in Tel Aviv. I'm always lucky to go to Tel Aviv.

I'm, I'm actually in New York now, so we opened our office in New York, we have presence. Good for you. Lately, part of our expansion there.

But going back to what you said, so usually these free ones, right? They don't go through procurement processes, they don't go through security vetting or anything, and it's so easy. So people just click the buttons, as you said, right?

And then it's cheap, right? It's for free. So it's, it is cheap on cost, but it's very expensive on data.

And this is their business model, just like you said, right? So they have their machine learning thing, they need to trade, right? They're setting this for advertisements and, you know, uh, and stuff like that.

And this is where they make the money from, from your data. They're eating on it. And an important note here that it's not just a data thing, right?

So it's not just leaking your sensitive information somewhere else, but these external entities also have permissions to change things and operates, right? So you can send, you write in your name, um, it can actually, you know, uh, change all the CRM data, um, and stuff like that. And this has a lot to do with business continuity, right?

With frauds. Um, so it's not just a data leak. Sometimes we think about things about, you know, just a third party, uh, data leak thing.

But it's not just that, right? It's any kind of permissions. And, and, And why if they get taken over by a malicious actor who now has those permissions on your system, forget it.

I mean, it's crazy. Well, listen, people could see in the background here, you guys were in R s A, uh, innovation Sandbox 2 20 20 23 finalist. You know, we're always at rsa.

We, we we're in Broadcast Alley, we put on the DevSecOps event there. The Sandbox, the Innovation Sandbox has been a tremendous, they, the companies they pick as finalists generally do well, right? Because they've got good technology, good teams, great ideas.

So congratulations on that. But really the big news too, you're welcome, is just thank you. Oh, you're welcome.

Uh, you guys just announced, uh, of Series A funding as well. Let's hear about that. Yeah.

So, so, um, yeah. So this is really, uh, the, the latest, uh, the latest news. Um, you know, first of all, I think raising any kind of amount of money in these markets is something that, you know, we are super grateful for.

And it's, you know, it's been an amazing journey so far. And it's just, you know, kind of, uh, builds, uh, builds the road ahead, uh, into both, you know, expanding the engineering side, so much to do, like you talked about, and the whole, you know, trends of everything as a service. Everything in the clickable button, um, is a huge tail in there for us.

We're seeing the traction from our customers asking us, you know, to push the roadmap forward, um, and expand our product. So it's a lot on the engineering side as well. Of course, on the go-to market side, as I shared before, we have a few sites now in Tel Aviv, in New York, and, uh, and in the west, there's, uh, much more to do there.

So, you know, this will be amazing fuel, uh, for asterisk. Um, you know, if if there was a higher stage to get from a r s a innovation sandbox, we would, uh, we would actually aim for that. Uh, like you said, the innovation, that was an amazing exposure.

Um, it's, you know, uh, really a privilege, and I think it's a kind of a dream come true for every cybersecurity founder. Sure. It's congratulations to you, uh, Alon or Jackson.

We're almost outta time. People out here. Our audience, you know, it's a cyber audience.

Th this sounds good to them. They want to get started. What's the on ramp?

How do they engage? How do they get started with Asterisk? Yeah.

Yeah. So the easiest way, you know, reaching out to us in any way, you know, possible, right? Our site has a click of a button.

You can actually try for free, get a scan of all your environments, learn about all the non-human identities, including your AI, just released a new free tool, uh, call Gen AI discovery, right? So everybody wants to know who's using chat, G p D, you know, what is it connected to, what is it exposed to, and stuff like that. You get full report, um, free, and, you know, hustles free.

That's, uh, very important. So no configurations, no agents, um, whatsoever. And then, you know, big part of our products, you can think of it as another connection that helps you and monitor all other connections, right?

So just like these apps say, you know, you click a button, you get everything, right? So you click a button, you get everything. In this case, it helps you manage the other buttons that people in the organization just click, right?

So that's very important. And, and, um, the talked about data that usually these third parties, uh, collect. Um, so our approach here is really asking for as minimum as possible, right?

So keeping the ROI as high as possible. So really asking for a little, and, uh, bringing a lot so we're not exposed to the sensitive information, uh, with our, our customers, uh, that we're connected to. So this really makes, you know, uh, adopting aspects very, very easy and trying us out very, very easy.

So through our website, it's click of a button, um, results are, you know, the same day in a matter of minutes. Um, yeah. And then reach out, you know, LinkedIn Super easy Website, though we didn't, we didn't give people the url.

com? io? What's the url?

com. Okay. security is probably the easiest out there.

Yeah. Excellent. Yeah.

Yep. I love It. Hey, Elon, thank you very much for being here on Tech Truck tv.

Best of continued success. In luck with Asterisk. We'll be watching.

Come back and keep us posted, man. Thank you very much, Alan. Thanks for having me.

All right. Alon Jackson, c e o co-founder Asterisk Security on Textron tv. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be right back after this.