Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning a little bit to the story of your entrepreneurial story. Let’s go back to eight years ago when you and your brother left your respective jobs to start this company. You both had deep experience in the security domain. You went and talked to Shlomo to get his validation and he resoundingly endorsed it. Did he offer you financing?

Aki Eldar: He invested.

Sramana Mitra: How did you start things off?

Aki Eldar: In Israel, there is a program which is led by the Office of the Chief Scientist. It’s part of the Economic Ministry of the Israeli government. This is a special program for startups where the government combines forces with the private industry and chooses different private entities to run incubators. 85% of the financing comes from the government and only 15% comes from the private sector. The private sector is the one that’s running the incubators. It’s a private incubator with government support. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. It’s wonderful to see that you pulled a hardcore technology product company out of India.

Varun Singh: You asked me earlier where the engineers were from. They’re from Veritas and IBM.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a good place to hire from. That’s a good thing about India right now. There are actually several generation of highly trained engineers who have worked at good companies building good products. There’s a lot of rich stuff if you can make them take risks.

Let me ask you a question, which is in the contemporary psyche. This whole notion of going to college. You didn’t go to college. You learned everything that you needed to learn in a very rich way. At the end of the day, you learned more by doing things hands-on than by studying theory. There’s no disagreement there. >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the types of data and the sources of data that you’re securing? You talked about email earlier.

Aki Eldar: We’re talking about any unstructured data. Unstructured data could be emails, files, or documents. Regarding your question about the source, it could be any source. It could be any application. It could be any repository on or off-premise. It could be any source of data creation.

Sramana Mitra: What is the architecture of the product? Where does it fit and how does it get deployed?

Aki Eldar: Before I answer your question, I will elaborate a bit about our concept. We are calling it data immunization. We are immunizing that data and making the threat irrelevant. This data immunization contains five elements. The first element is the central policy. We will be able to define policies for the protection. The second one is the interception. It is our ability to intercept any data creation from any source, which is really very important. We are not talking only about office. We are talking about any application whether it’s Salesforce.com or SAP. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have good defensible IP.

Varun Singh: Very good defensible IP. That started a few conversation with other VCs. I started a conversation with BV Jagdish from NetScaler. I was one of BV’s largest customers in India. I knew him through Net Magic because he was on the Board. He introduced me to Justin who is our CEO right now. At that point in time, I had hired Justin as the COO. He did about six months of consulting with us before that. Before that, he was the VP Sales at Juniper.

Sramana Mitra: He hadn’t been a CEO before? >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You had that experience as well. Both of you were security industry insiders and had lots of insight into what’s happening. The reason why I’m asking for this background is that security is probably the segment of the startup industry that has the maximum entrepreneurial activity. It’s crowded. There’s constant startup activity going on. Unless you have a really good handle on the ecosystem, it’s very difficult to do security companies.

Aki Eldar: I absolutely agree with you. This is also one of the reasons why it was really hard at the beginning. Do you know a bit about Data Leakage Prevention?

Sramana Mitra: A little bit, yes.

Aki Eldar: It’s also dealing with data protection but in a totally different way. It’s not protecting the data itself. It’s protecting the infrastructure against data loss and data leakage. This space was really crowded when we started Secure Islands. Only security experts understood our vision. One of them was Shlomo Kramer, who I assume you know. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You guys have already done six months prototype building with seven engineers?

Varun Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Nexus gave you money before that process started?

Varun Singh: Nexus gave us our seed round.

Sramana Mitra: How much?

Varun Singh: $750,000.

Sramana Mitra: How long did that take you? >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 2)

Aki Eldar: I and my brother founded Secure Islands. We did that because we figured out that there is a huge problem in the security industry. The problem was that people are talking about securing data, but they’re not actually doing it. They are securing the infrastructure, the exits, and the devices. But they are not securing the data itself. We thought that something needs to change here because it’s an endless game trying to fight against different threats and bad guys. It would be like a dog chasing its own tail. It will continue forever, but it will never succeed.

Instead of trying to defend threats, why not protect what is really important, which is the data itself. We are talking about unstructured data because this is the biggest problem. The reason that it is the biggest problem is as soon as a file or email is created, it’s already exposed internally and externally to thousands of different thread vectors. At the same time, organizations are no longer located in one place. They are located in a lot of places. Their data is spread all over – internally, externally, cloud, and mobile. This is a distributed environment. It is impossible to protect data by protecting the perimeter because the perimeter is not there anymore. We are talking about borderless enterprises. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This was what year?

Varun Singh: This was 2009.

Sramana Mitra: What is ScaleArc?

Varun Singh: ScaleArc is a database traffic management company. We provide a software that runs on top of MySQL and provide users the ability to run on a distributed data source without having to understand the application.

Sramana Mitra: You started this in India? >>>