Every enterprise we met with said data's the new oil, data's our most important asset. We were very lucky to have started building in a time where AI became top of mind for every enterprise.
As AI models and autonomous agents are rapidly plugged into the corporate world, they are consuming data at a rate not previously seen. But beneath the hype lies a massive multi-billion-dollar vulnerability. Most major corporations have absolutely no idea what data they actually have or where it lives. Enter Cyera.
In that world where data is moving from being in just one or two types of databases to being in hundreds and even thousands of types of systems, in the cloud, in AI systems, in that world being able to understand what data we have, where that data resides, how that data is being used, by whom, and for what purpose, it sounds so trivial, but to do it at enterprise scale, and to do it at the speed of technology today, is a huge challenge, and that was where the customers pointed Cyera initially.
When we started out and started meeting with security teams, what we heard from pretty much everyone was, "I don't know what sensitive data my organization has, and I don't know where it is and what's happening with it." Pretty scary notion, right? We saw the opportunity to solve this problem with models, with large language models, with small language models, and this is the really transformational technology that enabled to take a problem that's been around for decades and hasn't really had a good solution, and make it something that's solvable and feasible and really works at enterprise scale.
Co-founders Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar Ilan previously built and ran the cloud security division for the Israeli Defense Forces elite unit 8200. Then, in 2021, they launched Cyera. Now one of the world's fastest growing AI native data security companies with integrations across tools like Microsoft Sentinel, ServiceNow, and Okta. As Cyera grows, so do the company's product offerings.
Cyera offers a DSPM product, data security posture management. It offers products in the DLP space like Omni DLP, which is a DLP orchestration and enhancement product with AI. And an endpoint client, which is a replacement to the legacy endpoint DLP, but also allows customers to secure AI on the endpoint like Cloud Co-work and others. Cyera offers products in the identity space to protect how identities interact with data and which identities, human and non-human, exist in the IT ecosystem of the enterprise and in the identity security space.
As customers navigate the suite of offerings, the most exciting part for Cyera is watching users unlock their data in new ways.
So, probably one of the first aha moments is logging into like just the data stores page and being able to see the hundreds or in many cases like hundreds of thousands of data stores in your environment with kind of a granular breakdown of every type of data, every file that's contained within each one. Most CISOs and CTOs have never had that kind of visibility before. And so it's just kind of like a kid in a candy shop. They want to just go and explore and see what's in there.
But once companies open their data to autonomous AI agents, the risk to an enterprise's security grows.
I think the most basic challenge enterprises are dealing with today with data security and AI is that we buried a lot of sins in the access people had to data that they never used. We all have access to millions of documents, countless data that we've never touched and we'll never touch as human beings. But agents are not like us. They move much faster, they read faster, and they're able to go through endless quantities of data and everything and anything they can put their hands on is going to rise to the surface. A lot of the security at present state is just based on the fact that humans never look for it. They never dig all the way through, they never rummage through every drawer and try to find the secrets and the agents do. And that's a material change that everybody is experiencing.
The beautiful and powerful thing about agents is that they have this independence and autonomy and can really do a lot more than a simple application, but that's also a potential risk that needs to be managed and curtailed. And in that sense, you really need the automated visibility and control into how these agents are behaving and what they're doing.
We also detect issues that are associated with your AI tools or your agents. An issue is kind of a violation like a misconfiguration that might introduce risk. So, in this case, we've identified that this agent is missing guardrails. Guardrails, you can think of them as controls around an agent to prevent it from doing something. So, someone asks a question about a topic that you don't want, you can block them from doing that. This agent touches health care data, sensitive data, and it doesn't have any guardrails in place. So, what we might recommend is to put guardrails in place to prevent it from sending sensitive data to the wrong person.
Cyera can also catch real-time threats from bad actors within a company.
