Bootstrapping an EdTech Venture to $6M, Ready to Scale with AI: Daniel Santos, CEO of Prepory (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Let’s go back to this point where you have three high schools that you’re working with to validate your business model. How much were they willing to pay you?

Bootstrapping an EdTech Venture to $6M, Ready to Scale with AI: Daniel Santos, CEO of Prepory (Part 1)

This story is a great example of an EdTech company that has built a validated, bootstrapped, profitable business that can potentially be scaled using AI.

Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: For both of these functions—the product definition side and the iterative product definition side, as well as the actual scenario mapping on the engineering side, are you using off-the-shelf tools, or using stuff that have you built yourselves? What does the infrastructure look like?

Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, two questions on AI. First one is, as you said, there is a tailwind, clearly, because agentic AI this year in 2025 has started to take off, and we are doing this interview in June 2025. We have started hearing about agents quite aggressively all through this year.

So, the vulnerabilities caused by agentic AI are already becoming a bigger opportunity than what you had originally set out to work on. Now, my question is very specific. In your enterprise customers, is agentic AI an issue yet?

Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Now, you talked about the commercial terms. What kinds of terms would you advise people, based on your experience and your learning? What terms do you advise for channel partnerships? What are the secrets of a successful channel partnership?

Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What were the milestones of that first round of $15 million financing that you raised? What did you accomplish with that and in what timeframe?

Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, when once you got the $15 million, how long did it take you to get the fresh product out?

Alon Jackson: Well, a product is a big word. An MVP or providing initial value—that’s actually an interesting story. It took us two weeks.

Sramana Mitra: Two weeks! Tell me more. What did you put in the MVP?

Building a Venture Scale Cyber Security Startup in the Age of AI: Alon Jackson, CEO of Astrix Security (Part 1)

Alon comes from the rich ecosystem of Cyber Security entrepreneurs in Israel. He has built an excellent, high growth AI Cyber Security company. You will find an in-depth discussion on his strategy that has included raising $85M in funding.