Sramana Mitra: In 2014, all the money that you raised was from Credit Suisse Next? Aki Eldar: Only from Credit Suisse Next, which was also a vote of trust coming from a customer. Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone? Aki Eldar: The next milestone is we’re expanding worldwide. We have an office in the US.
Sramana Mitra: What year did you get that customer? Aki Eldar: 2010. Sramana Mitra: The financial crisis has settled a little bit. I was raising my eyebrows that you got a financial institution. A little bit of time had passed from the calamity. Aki Eldar: They had a huge problem. We were the only one
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
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
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.
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
Security is the venture industry’s most active segment. It is also the most crowded segment, and unless you have deep domain knowledge, you cannot play in the business. Aki and his brother do have deep domain knowledge and have leveraged that to build an exciting company. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of