Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: All right. So then, last question. At this point, you have raised $40 million for this company, or has there been more money into the company?

Alon Jackson: Yeah, so we raised a Series B round a few months ago. That brings the total funding to $85 million. We’re reaching about a hundred employees and have customers across the globe. Our main focus is North America— the United States and Canada but are expanding almost everywhere these days.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have?

Alon Jackson: That’s something I’ll keep discrete on this platform, but it’s a nice and growing number.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal sizes are you operating with from a business model point of view? Is it an ARR-based business model? SaaS business model?

Alon Jackson: Yes, it’s SaaS. The product is SaaS, so there’s ARR. A lot of multi-year contracts, which is something that excites me. That proves the value we provide. So, it’s ARR-based pricing. We have two tiers: mid-enterprises (thousands of employees) and large enterprises.

Sramana Mitra: The mid-tiers are more like six-figure deals, and the bigger ones are seven-figure deals?

Alon Jackson: Yes. The smaller enterprises would be anywhere between 50K for a starter package to 100K. The larger ones can be between 100K to a million, depending on the size of the environments to be supported.

Sramana Mitra: Is pricing on the table for discussion? With the advent of AI, business models are under scrutiny – impact-based pricing, usage-based pricing. Lots of discussions happening in terms of pricing business models. Is that something you’ve revisited?

Alon Jackson: That’s something I’m thinking about a lot. I always come back to the same fundamental aspect. With new technology and a new market, you want your pricing model to be as simple, predictable, and scalable as possible.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s seat-based, environment-based, integration-based — what matters is that you’re enabling your customers to predict and adopt quickly. In the future or five years from now, we might change the pricing model, but for now, ease of adoption, predictability, and scalability matter most.

Sramana Mitra: And the kinds of discussions that are happening in the market about impact-based pricing and so on. These are not predictable at all, right? The SaaS model gained wide adoption in the last 20-25 years because of its predictability and simplicity. Software going from CapEx to OpEx helped tremendously in the adoption of SaaS pricing model. Now there’s talk about impact- or usage-based pricing, but these are not predictable.

Alon Jackson: I understand. It really depends on what the business is doing, what kind of solution you’re providing, and how many customers you have. Can you put an average on monthly or annual consumption?

Even if you lose a bit on a customer, it’s more important to have a happy customer who promotes you to others. That’s what matters most for a startup versus running to profitability. We’re not public yet, so that’s the trade-off.

Sometimes, you need to find something that makes sense and is easy, even if you lose some, to make sure the customer is confident that they’re getting value and ROI, at least in the short term.

Sramana Mitra: Well, Alon, it was a great interview. Thank you for sharing your story and good luck.

Alon Jackson: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Bye.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security
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