I am excited to announce that our portfolio company Neosec has been acquired by Akamai Technologies, marking a significant milestone for the company and its founders, Giora Engel (CEO) and Ziv Sivan (CTO). Congratulations to them both and to the entire Neosec team for the hard work and dedication, and for building a product that has stood out in a complex market, despite facing stiff competition from well-funded rivals. In an impressively short time frame of about two and a half years since inception, Neosec built a product that rivaled, if not surpassed, its competitors.
As an investor in Neosec, I have had the privilege of working closely with Giora and Ziv, and I can attest to their integrity, passion, and exceptional product execution. They truly embody what it is to be a “Mench” and have been a joy to collaborate with. It was an honor to be part of their journey and to witness firsthand their drive, vision, and unwavering commitment to their customers. I would also like to thank them personally for entrusting me to co-lead their series A investment. Considering it would be the first investment I would lead, and they likely had multiple alternate options, I am thankful for the confidence and trust they showed in me.
Our introduction to Giora and Ziv was rather unconventional. One of our portfolio companies had asked us to research on emerging security categories. We did so, and began digging into API security. At the time, it was becoming clear that API security had the potential to become a category of its own, and customers were favoring specific API security vendors over traditional WAF solutions that were not designed for APIs. Looking back, we believe that this trend has proven itself correct and today security is on the mind of every company developing an API. One only needs to read Postman’s annual “State of the API” report to identify this growing trend.
What stood out to us about Neosec was their unique perspective and insight which set them apart from the other pure-play API security vendors we met. Giora shared two key insights with us that eventually became the cornerstones of Neosec’s product suite. The first was that customers preferred hosted solutions over on-premise ones. Giora and Ziv were fanatic about building a cloud-native solution, to serve the most modern and frontier API users.
The second, and perhaps the significant differentiator, was around Giora and Ziv’s insight into how to best detect API user behavior. Most security solutions look at a singular customer’s data, in this case, API logs or network traffic, in a silo. They develop detection algorithms in order to detect attacks, but these algorithms run over a singular customer’s data set. Giora believed that customers’ data can be aggregated in order to create larger data sets which would enable even the most sophisticated attacks to be detected. This is a theoretically nice idea, but in practice requires a great deal of technology in order to collect, decrypt, anonymize and also clean large amounts of data. The complexity of this challenge was no barrier for the Neosec team.
Giora and Ziv’s vision for Neosec was clear and compelling, and we knew we wanted to be a part of it. We were honored to have the opportunity to co-lead their Series A investment and to work with such exceptional founders. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Neosec under Akamai’s leadership and wish Giora and Ziv all the best in their next adventure.
