Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 7)

Rohyt Belani: Then, we’ll help you analyze this. We’ve built technology to not only  help with the analysis but also leverage existing security investments. If they’re using FireEye, we’re not competing with them. We actually fit along side them. Let’s say the Sandbox from FireEye, or the URL analysis product from WebSense, and take all these factors and say, “What is it that I’m looking at? How bad does it really look?” It’s very difficult to come up with a binary this-is-bad-for-sure or this-is-good-for-sure answer. It’s more of a confidence rating. That’s really what we look to do—operationalize human intelligence.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the competition? What’s the direct competition?

Rohyt Belani: If you look at the product portfolio that I just talked about going from simulation, assisting with reporting, to assisting teams analyze these reports. If you look at it holistically, we don’t have any company that offers this entire gamut of offerings holistically. We have competition on each one of these verticals, I would say. The simulation is the one that we’ve had around the longest. That’s where we have the most competition. We have a couple of companies, one, which ironically, was a spin out from Carnegie Mellon by a couple of professors that compete with us in that space. Their focus is on learning management and education. Our focus is on the phishing threat. There’s a little bit different approach to it but we do have an overlap on the simulation piece and I consider them direct competition. On the other piece—the human intelligence piece—we actually don’t have anyone competing with us right now.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of whatever metrics makes sense to share?

Rohyt Belani: Like I said, we’re continuing to grow along this very strong trajectory of 100% year-on-year growth. We’ve been doubling in revenues. We are now past 150 full-time employees. We have 37 of the Fortune 100 as customers on our platform. We have several of the Fortune 500. We’re really expanding internationally. We have offices in London, Dubai, Singapore, and Canada. We are expanding the product portfolio with recent innovations. Those are our growth drivers and we’re looking to continue by leveraging these growth drivers and continue doubling year on year.

Sramana Mitra: How much money have you raised total?

Rohyt Belani: $15.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers roughly speaking?

Rohyt Belani: We have over 600.

Sramana Mitra: What is your average deal size now?

Rohyt Belani: If you do the math on that, we are at $25 million annual billings. Just over $40,000 per annum, if you average across the board.

Sramana Mitra: Where is the sweet spot? Is it large enterprises that are buying more?

Rohyt Belani: It’s interesting. We’ve not really had a concerted strategy on SMBs. So far, you walk in the door. If you’re really quick on issuing a purchase order, we’ll cater you. We have focused much more on the upper end of the mid-sized market and mostly the enterprise market so far. The price point that I talked about is limited to our simulator product line. For Triage, we’re actually seeing more than doubling of the annual contract value even in its early version just because the value proposition is stopping real attacks. It’s very different from, “We’re simulating attacks and telling you what’s happening.”

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you very much for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe
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