From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 5)

Slava Bronfman: It was a better year in terms of sales. Earlier, a lot of our sales were based on physical conferences. It’s hard to compete as a small startup. If you go to a conference and you have a small booth, it’s hard to compete. Now remote working levels the playing field. We felt that it was easier for us to approach customers remotely. We have customers around the globe. We have customers in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. It was relatively easier than before.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard this from a lot of startups. The pandemic has been a boon for them for exactly the same reasons.

Slava Bronfman: The pandemic was good for Cybellum in terms of business.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the movement out of 100% automotive focus to broadening your market. How did you choose the next market?

Slava Bronfman: When we started, we understood that automotive is not our sole market. It was just our initial market. We set a few KPIs for when we can move to other verticals. The KPI was that we will have a good enough foothold in that vertical. We made a list of the biggest customers in that sector. 80% of them will be considered to be in a good position to dominate the vertical.

In the beginning of 2021, we were in that place. We had enough customers in the automotive space. Also their suppliers. Then we did a comprehensive case study of other verticals to understand the TAM, the competitors, and the regulation.

Our study yielded something counter-intuitive. We first thought that our next market would be somewhere in the transportation or mobility area, maybe aviation. After doing the case study, the market had a lot of problems. They have a very long sales cycle.

The market that we identified as the most relevant was the medical device market. It was also very highly regulated. They also have a new role in medical device companies called CIPSO which is the Chief Product Security Officer. It’s the peer of the CISO.

It’s harder to achieve a completely new product security approach if you run it under CISO. It was also a blue market. There was no mature platform to give a full solution to the market. Another thing that we did was try to sell to a few companies. We started running POCs.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Where are you now? It’s been a year in the medical device area.

Slava Bronfman: Very well. They’re adopting our solution even quicker than the automotive space.

Sramana Mitra: It has more pressure from the industry to follow along.

Slava Bronfman: Absolutely. Our product is mature now after a couple of years in the automotive sector. We are coming still as a startup with a mature solution. Also in the last two years, we have developed a concept called the Cyberdigital Twins where we are creating a digital replica of physical devices. Then we can emulate and simulate all our security analysis on those digital replicas. They are not intrusive. Customers love it.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you revenue-wise?

Slava Bronfman: Most of the company was acquired by the end of last year. We are still an independent company with our own brand, but we were acquired by LG. We are a subsidiary of LG today, so I can’t talk about revenue numbers.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful story! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman
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