Ionix, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based Attack Surface Management (ASM) company, secured $15m in additional Series A funding. In conjunction with the announcement, the CEO Marc Gaffan, replied to our questions about the company, the product, the funding, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Marc, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I’m CEO of IONIX, a security startup in the Attack Surface Management (ASM) space. Prior to this, I was CEO of Hysolate, also in security, and before that I was co-founder and later CEO of Incapsula, a global cloud application delivery service that protects and accelerates websites, SaaS platforms and other digital infrastructure. I co-founded Incapsula back in 2009 and after its acquisition by Imperva, led the Incapsula business to $100 million in run rate, protecting millions of websites worldwide and many of the world’s largest enterprises and Telcos.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Attack Surface Management (ASM). What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
The speed at which organizations’ attack surfaces are growing and changing has exceeded their security teams’ abilities to keep track of all their corporate assets. In addition, companies are moving to the cloud, using SaaS tools, third-party suppliers – all of these are contributing factors to expanding the attack surface beyond a security team’s span of control.
The opportunity IONIX solves is comprehensive threat exposure management across the attack surface – even deep into a company’s digital supply-chain. One of our customers put it best, “IONIX allows my team to actively seek, find and fix critical threats from this dynamic and vast digital environment before they impact our organization and our customers.” This is often referred to as ‘proactive security’.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
There are three features that differentiate IONIX ASM from other tools in the market. The first is our deep asset discovery (going deep into your SaaS applications, third party vendors, etc.), with the capabilities to also let you know what is urgent and important for your security team to fix. We call this ‘prioritization’ and it encompasses many features of our product that together highlight only the critical risks that need to be fixed urgently.
The second is something only IONIX does, called ‘Active Protection’ which is a feature of our product that, in cases where IONIX detects specific exploitable vulnerabilities, we can take over the asset before a hacker does. Active Protection automatically neutralizes the threat, with no action required on the security team’s part.
The third unique feature is how we help companies prioritize risk – even and especially within the digital supply chain. This is a combination of things that include blast radius, risk scores, asset importance and what we call risky connections – meaning we know how assets are connected, and which connections are the most important. These features form the basis for our “Connective Intelligence”.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
IONIX announced that we completed our $42M A Round financing by securing $15 million in additional funding from new investors Maor Investments along with participation from existing investors Hyperwise Ventures, Team8 and U.S. Venture Partners (USVP). Total funding to date is $50.3 Million.
In addition, we’ve announced that cyber veteran Chad Kinzelberg will be joining IONIX’s Board of Directors. Chad has extensive experience in cybersecurity. He was senior vice president of Corporate and Business Development at Palo Alto Networks from pre-IPO to 2018. Previous roles at Verisign’s cybersecurity business and as CEO of Santa Cruz Networks make him an ideal candidate to help support IONIX’s success.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?
2023 was a growth year for IONIX in every way. Since the original A-round fundraising in 2022, the company’s Annual Recurring Revenue increased by 270% and the number of new customers increased by 210%. We’re looking forward to what 2024 will bring!
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
In the past year we have seen a shift in the ASM market from a focus on discovery and visibility, into a more mature market requiring security validation, better discovery evidence, asset prioritization and deeper discovery into both internal and external cloud assets. We look forward to helping more and more companies get better at continuous, proactive security.
FinSMEs
06/02/2024