British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey (Part 1)

ScanSafe pioneered web-based Secure Web Gateway, which blocks malware and secure web-based messaging. Founded in 1999 by brothers Roy and Eldar Tuvey, ScanSafe is a company that invented a new market. In 2007 ScanSafe was named one of the top 100 technology startups in the world by Red Herring and was recognized as a technology innovator and visionary company by Gartner.

SM: Where do you come from? What is your background?

RT: I was born in Israel but my family moved to London when I was very young. I spent a lot of time in Israel until I was 13, but I mainly grew up in London. I went to the University of London, where I earned an economics degree. I then worked in investment banking with Merrill Lynch. I worked primarily in the mergers and acquisitions business, primarily transatlantic cross-border transactions. There was a lot of UK work as well as some emerging market work.

SM: Was it based in technology?

RT: No, it was generalist M&A. We did have some specific industry specializations, but in those days in London, technology was not a big practice for Merrill Lynch and to be honest they have not done well, even now, in that area.

SM: Tell me about your brother. I understand he is your partner in this venture.

RT: After I worked at Merrill Lynch I worked in private equity. Eldar was also a finance guy who worked at Goldman Sachs in London. He is five years older than me. After he did his Goldman stint he went and did an MBA at INSEAD. Then he ran a business in the entertainment vending area. Basically, our paths crossed in 1999 when we were investigating potential business ideas in the technology market, which we were both very interested in. He came up with this genesis of an idea. I was still working in private equity at the time and he was still working in his business.

When I was on holiday in December of 1999, I gave the idea some proper thought. By the time I landed I felt it was something that had legs and that we should definitely do it.

SM: What was the idea?

RT: Today we do SaaS-based web security. We protect companies when users access the Internet, and we were the first company in the world to do that. That was not how we started out. We were always in the ASP business, when it was called ASP. Now it is called something different, but it was email marketing. It was pretty specific what we were doing. That was the germ of the idea, and a few things happened in the evolution of the business that brought us to where we are today.

SM: What happened with the email marketing business?

RT: A few things happened. First, it was initially consumer focused. We had an advertising revenue stream, but it was becoming increasingly clear to us that it was becoming niche focused and that all of our advertising was getting consolidated and focused on the big guys. We had a niche play, which we never felt was exciting enough to run a business in the area.

We tried to reposition very early. We refocused on B2B email marketing. We had some traction and got lots of customers but it was still painful going, so we just re-engineered the business. As part of this email marketing business, we had entered into a joint venture with the leading Internet café vendors around the world. When users would go into those cafés and use their webmail accounts, all of that webmail traffic would get routed by our raw data center in London and we would introduce targeted marketing content. People would check their email and find a targeted ad, and that was our revenue stream. That helped us develop the genesis of the technology behind what we do today, which is scanning traffic for viruses and malware. Our technology is all about handling and processing huge volumes of traffic outside of the corporate network in the cloud.

This segment is part 1 in the series : British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey
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