Name: Yotam Segev, Cyera
Uploaded: 2024-12-17T20:08:00.000Z
Duration: 16 min 13 s

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Yotam Segev

Co-Founder & CEO

Cyera

play_circle_outline Rapid growth and success as fastest growing data security company

play_circle_outline Impact of Cyera's Compound AI system and DSPM on cybersecurity

play_circle_outline SaaS security challenges and solutions

play_circle_outline Role of data security posture management in business enablement

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Yotam Segev, Cyera

Yotam Segev

Co-Founder & CEO Cyera

Cyera, founded by Yotam Segev, specializes in data security posture management (DSPM) for cloud technology. They aim to reach a hundred million ARR next year. Data security includes access control and governance, crucial for protecting personal, financial, and intellectual information. The rise of AI emphasizes effective data management and security. Cyera's Compound AI system offers a comprehensive solution for data visibility and risk assessment. Its cloud-native architecture allows scalability in enterprise environments. Focusing on DSPM in SaaS ecosystems... Read more

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What is the current rate of growth for Cyera and how much are they projected to earn in ARR next year? add

What is the unique capability of the Compound AI system being discussed? add

What is considered the core capability for SaaS security by many customers? add

What impact does providing visibility to data have on the role of CISOs within an organization? add

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Yotam Segev, Cyera

Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to NYSC and theCUBE's Media Week. This is Cyber and AI Innovators. My name is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also here. We're high above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and we're super excited to have Yotam Segev here. He's the co-founder and CEO of Cyera, another cyber security innovator. Great to see you, man. Thanks for coming in. What do you think about this awesome setup we have here?

>> Really cool setup up here.

Dave Vellante

>> It is cool.

>> Sitting on top of the world's economy.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, exactly right. Okay, I got to start with why did you start the company, you and your co-founders?

>> I started the company because we had our own personal experience building a business that was very sensitive in cloud and realizing that the way that you protect what matters most, which is data information, in this new world that is the cloud world, it's not the same as what we used to do. We used to lock data up in a vault, we used to detach it from the internet. And once you move into the cloud and you are adopting all of these wonderful technologies that allow us to leverage data so well and allow us to build AI, you have to look for new approaches in order to be able to do that. And if you don't do that, you're going to find yourself in a big problem where your most valuable assets are compromised.

Dave Vellante

>> It's funny, when cloud first came out, it was startups that leaned into the cloud. A lot of the traditional enterprises, like in the financial services world said, "No, we're not going to go to the cloud." Turned out that the cloud service providers, AWS in particular, had great security for their little part of the world, and then all of a sudden there's this shared responsibility model. There's all these tools, there's APIs, there's this burgeoning ecosystem, and then the first line of defense just became kind of like Swiss cheese. And so this is the problem that you guys set out to solve. So very interesting. Now I have a note here that you are the world's fastest growing data security company.

>> That we are.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. I said I was going to push you a little bit on this. So that means you're either growing really fast, which I'm sure you are, but you could be really small if you're $2 growing to $500. Wow, that's amazing growth, but you have to add some context to that.

>> I think right now Cyera is on path to cost a hundred million ARR next year.

Dave Vellante

>> That's substantial.

>> And the rate of growth is still 4X year over year. So that's incredible. We're seeing tremendous growth and a lot of that is due to the urgency in this space for enterprises, for customers, and due to the product's ability to show value, be implemented and deliver results in a very, very quick timeframe, which can help move things quickly.

Dave Vellante

>> That's remarkable. When did you start the company?

>> I started the company three and a half years ago.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. 100 million ARR in three and a half years. That's impressive. And that's especially that growth rate. To what do you attribute that growth?

>> Again, I think that the customer's urgency on the space could not be overstated. Everybody's looking to adopt AI, and when you think about AI, it runs on two things. It runs on GPUs, and we're all seeing NVIDIA's immense success in the markets building those GPUs. And it runs on data. Enterprises traditionally have not done a good job of managing data. I joke that if you ask people how good of a driver they are, on average they say they're about an eight. And if you ask people how good they manage and secure data in their enterprise, on average they're about a two. So people just find it hard to believe that everybody else as bad at it as they are. And that's the pain because AI is really making data so important for the enterprise, making it so crucial to know what you have, to control the access to it, because suddenly it's no longer permission. Somebody can access something in SharePoint. Now you can write a little query in CoPilot and get the answer immediately. And if you have access to that data, that data became very accessible through the introduction of AI. And that's why it's becoming so urgent for customers.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. You've disconnected the dots. I was trying to understand the connection between data and security. It's not just a privacy issue, it's access control. Correct?

>> Absolutely. When you think about the way people secure their company, what are we trying to secure? Two things in general. We're trying to secure the services we provide. Like if I put a credit card in the ATM and I ain't getting any cash, that's a problem and everybody knows it's a problem. We're trying to secure the information that these services aggregate and collect. So obviously the bank that has the ATM also has a lot of information about my financial transactions, my financial behaviors, my personal information. And that is becoming extremely valuable, both from a business monetization perspective, but also for hackers that are after it. Now, personal information, financial information is one example, but also intellectual property, like trade secrets, manufacturing procedures and processes. These are the things that actually give companies their advantage in the market and the need to protect that information, protect that data. It's becoming more crucial than ever.

Dave Vellante

>> And even though we're talking about security, it does actually touch upon privacy and compliance and governance.

>> It does.

Dave Vellante

>> And organizations, especially in the financial services world, but certainly healthcare and government, highly regulated industries. They have to worry about this. It starts with security, but it touches other adjacencies, doesn't it?

>> Absolutely. And we are sitting here over the public markets, the SEC recently, over the last six months, put in the materiality reporting requirements. In order to assess the materiality of a breach, obviously you need to be able to understand what data was impacted. That today takes companies on average four to six months. That's a very long timeframe, which doesn't correspond to the intention of the materiality reporting, which is saying if you have an incident and it's material, you need to let us know quickly. You need to let the market know quickly. So companies have to change the way they deal with information with data in order to be able to answer these regulations like materiality reporting by the SEC.

Dave Vellante

>> It's got to be real-time speed. Okay. You got to tell me about this data industry story. You got the growth of data, you got risks associated with data, but there's two sides of that coin because there's risks and there's opportunities.

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> What's your narrative around that?

>> I think for our customers, the biggest driver is generate more revenue. Cyera can show us the data we have in our ecosystem, better, faster, more accurate, more contextualized than any other product or any other partner in the market. That can service us to secure it, of course, but also to drive innovation, to get to market faster, to shorten the time it takes us to provision access to data within the company, to data scientists, to data analysts, to data consumers, and to essentially accelerate our AI adoption and our data transformation.

Dave Vellante

>> Now, I got to ask you about data security, posture management. I asked you earlier, was that a Gartner term? They said, "It is now." You created this market, correct? Is that a correct claim essentially?

>> The problem existed traditionally and people did-

Dave Vellante

>> Explain the problem and then how you guys stepped in and what role you've played.

>> The problem is really simple. We're all experiencing it in our own personal garage at home. You start to amass stuff. That stuff can be property and it can be data. And after a certain point you start to lose control. I don't know. Your own personal folders where you keep your personal information, family finances, at some point that's just too much there. And it happens pretty quickly on. The same exact thing happens to enterprises, you start to amass information, generate information, and you don't have good practices in place for how to clean that information out. And at some point you just lose control. You drowned in the garbage you've accumulated. Some of that garbage is sensitive, valuable needs to be reused. Some of it needs to go to the can. And it's very hard to differentiate between the data that matters and the data that clatters.

Dave Vellante

>> And it's tedious to get rid of it, and it's not time consuming, and it's not really accurate. Humans aren't really good at that.

>> And automating that, automating the distinction of what data is valuable, what data is important, what data is sensitive, that was the first step in DSPM in data security, posture management, creating visibility at the enterprise level to data. That's something that enterprises never had. They tried to manually classify data, they tried to query application owners about what data they're collecting in their application. But to actually create a sensor that is able to go and identify all the data in the enterprise automatically at scale. And we're talking about incredible scale and create that inventory of sensitive data, that's the foundation of DSPM that just didn't exist before Cyera.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. Talk to me about how you do this. You have this compound AI system. You are using machine learning, legacy machine learning we sometimes joke. NLP, so you'll be able to interact in natural language. You've got statistical validation, so you're using, I guess probabilistic math. RegX, which I'm not sure exactly what that is. Explain all that cocktail of AI, if you will.

>> I think with every complicated problem in the world today, from an engineering perspective, the way that you can tackle it is not by one magical LLM that solves all the problems.

Dave Vellante

>> This we know.

>> That just doesn't work. So what happens is what we are calling Compound AI. This is a system that leverages LLMs and leverages NLP and leverages legacy machine learning and even leverages legacy RegX pattern matching, which was a traditional way to identify data. But you have to build that with a lot of engineering into a compound system that's actually able to deliver on the use case you are solving. The use case we are solving is we want to be able to show our customers the data they have out there in a way that any analyst can consume without asking them what to look for. So without any prior knowledge of what we should be looking for. By doing that, we are able to shed light, to turn on the light on this weird intangible asset called data, the information itself that the enterprise is accumulating in so many places today in the cloud, in Snowflake, in SharePoint, in on-prem file shares, in databases. It lives everywhere on the endpoints. So that's our unique capability. That's our unique engineering prowess. You combine that with an agent-less cloud-native architecture that allows us to scale across very large environments without any network connections. That allows us to really bring a game-changer capability into the market, and that's been a big part of our success with the top enterprises that really want to be able to scale this type of solution across a huge, huge, huge enterprise footprint.

Dave Vellante

>> This Compound AI system you have, it sounds like you're taking advantage of the combinatorial effects of these innovations. It's not just bespoke pieces that you put a veneer on. It's like a puzzle that fits together. Is that fair? Or you can you understand where to apply the different innovations and that's your IP.

>> That's absolutely right. And when you think about it, there's some technological building blocks that are good at a specific task. Some things are really good at identifying, some things are really good at removing false positives. Some things can add context. And what engineering has to do is they have to bring all of those capabilities together into something that really makes the plane take off.

Dave Vellante

>> How about SaaS security? We talked about cloud, we think of cloud infrastructure, but what about SaaS? There's so many Microsoft users out there, 365, it's ubiquitous. They're pushing now co-pilots, agents. They're going to create more problems. How should we think about securing this sort of new world in this era of agentic, and of course SaaSification has taken hold for a decade plus. How should we think about that?

>> What we are seeing with our customers is that they're looking at DSPM, data security posture management as their core capability for SaaS security. It's not that there aren't other things they need for SaaS security, but the core aspect of SaaS security today is what data are we putting into these SaaS ecosystems, whether it's SharePoint or ServiceNow or Snowflake or whatnot, and who's got access to that data? And those are two questions that are at the heart of DSPM and what we deliver for our customers and that's why we're becoming a very, very important foundational solution for them for their SaaS security needs. Not only that, but the unique thing about the data lens is that we are able to unify the view and quantification of risk across such a myriad of systems. So you think about it, the customers don't care about the risks they have in SharePoint and the risks they have in Salesforce and the risks they have in ServiceNow. They just want to see the top time risks across the company and go after them. If seven of them are in Salesforce, so be it. But they don't have a dedicated security team for each of these platforms, so they need to focus on the risks that matter the most, no matter what ecosystem they live in.

Dave Vellante

>> You unify this, shine a light on it, and then how do I take action? Do you feed other systems or systems of agency? Do you take certain actions? What's the next step?

>> Both of those methods are being leveraged by our customer base. Obviously, mature enterprises have many remediation workflows that they operate through, ticketing systems that they operate through, existing SOC and SOC workflows that they operate through, and we plug into all of those. But we also have automation capabilities within our platform on how to close the loop on these types of risks.

Dave Vellante

>> Now you guys, you wrote a report on security posture management, I think around focus on adoption and challenges. And what did you learn from that study?

>> I think we learned that this is a top priority for so many CISOs going into 2025. People feel like data is the frontier that they have to deal with now. AI is obviously a huge advent of that, but it's put it as a top priority for the majority of organizations out there and they want to take action. I think the other thing that we've found is that this is actually a business enabler. CISOs, and it's funny, they've been telling me, "Yotam, most of the things we do, if I don't do them tomorrow, nobody knows, nobody cares." we hunt for threats. We do all sorts of things that the business doesn't actually see. But when I start to provide them with this visibility to data, when I give that to my CIO, my CTO, my chief data officer, suddenly I'm a business enabler. Suddenly I'm giving them something they didn't have before and it's becoming core to their businesses. So this is a service that is very tied to the business and it's giving security leaders and CISOs the opportunity to take a step-up and not only do something that's for security's sake, but use security to actually accelerate the business and accelerate the revenue for the enterprise.

Dave Vellante

>> It makes sense. If you can show strong security posture management for a new platform, you can roll that out more quickly. It gets past all the security and compliance issues. Yotam, we've got to run. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thank you. Thank you, David.

Dave Vellante

>> And good luck with everything. Loved having you. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. Our next guest is up right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire NYSE Wired and CUBE community. This is our Media Week, cyber and AI innovators. We'll be right back.