Welcome in to another episode of the Inside the Ice House podcast. Today's guest is Yotam Segev. He is the co-founder and CEO of Cyera. Yotam, thanks so much for joining us inside the Ice House. Happy to have you here.
Thank you for having me, Lance. So earlier this year, Cyera announced a $400 million Series F, which sets the company's valuation at 9 billion. First and foremost, congratulations on that success. And when that kind of capital comes in, right, it could really open up, I think, a set of new possibilities. So to start our conversation on this such funding, how are you really thinking about putting it to work, right? What does a capital allocation strategy look like now moving forward?
I think that in the space we play, the challenge that our customers are dealing with is immense. And while Cyera today is able to deliver tremendous value for them, we're not yet at a place where we can solve the entire challenge the way we'd like. So when we're looking at this capital infusion, we see it as an opportunity to really invest in our product, invest in our platform and move from a position of a value creator, you know, a tool within their toolkit into a solution to one of their key business problems and key business challenges. And I think that, you know, that is the real unlocker here with the capital and the real opportunity is to leverage the momentum and traction we have in the market to double down on our product and really be able to offer the best offering in the market for data and AI security.
Yeah. And you really want to put the capital to work. It's one thing to bring it in, but it's then what do you do with it now that you have it that really is what helps take a company to the next step. And when a company scales at the level that you have, it's really not just about adding more resources. It's about choosing really the right bets and the right areas of growth, right? Like I said before, you want to have the capital and then you want to figure out what to do with it. So what do you see as really the biggest opportunities for growth and where do you sort of feel this new round will help Cyera to truly accelerate its trajectory?
I think the challenges of adopting AI in the enterprise are still very nascent and we're only seeing the early innings of this campaign evolve. So our position is to bring together, you know, the AI itself with identity and with data which is the core of our platform today. I think, you know, we want to turn this year from a company that is very strong in data security to a company that has a lot of strength in these three areas: AI, identity, and data, and being able to stitch that fabric together in a very meaningful way. And I think that that's going to position us in a very robust and flexible way to enable the AI adoption whatever it might look like because I think the question marks still outweigh the answers in this regard. Every enterprise is trying to figure out the design patterns, the architecture, how are they going to enable Agentic AI, how are they going to leverage LLMs with their proprietary data and, you know, we want to be there able to partner with them where they are.
Mhm. And so you bring up right like where AI is going and I think there are so many more questions than answers still at this point right like what does the future look like not just, you know, 5 to 10 years from now but next year next month right over the next week right what does the future of AI look like and a friend of mine said to me actually on this podcast he made a good point he said AI is the worst it's ever been right now right it will only continue to get better so with that being said with the fact that it will only continue to grow things will only continue to change and evolve. Do you have any insights or any ideas as to where it might be going? Like where do you see this technology that is old although sort of saw this boom maybe back in 2022, right? Like where do you see it going in your opinion? Where is AI's future?
Yeah, I think that, you know, the LLM itself, what you might draw a parallel to the brain, is quite powerful today and they will get better and they will continue to improve. But I think that we're already seeing that there's some exceptional capability there that we really haven't seen before in previous waves of technology. But that brain today is a bit detached from a body. It doesn't necessarily have the right arms, legs, you know, strength to go and actually make an impact, execute in the world. And especially when I look at the enterprise space, I think that the amount of work it takes to get AI into production to actually turn AI into something that is more of a let's call it a foundation and not a nice add-on. Okay, it takes tremendous work from the enterprise today. A lot of that work has to do with the security and compliance requirements that are non-trivial. A lot of that work has to do with the integration capabilities. How do we actually connect it into the environment? How do we get our data ready for AI usage? And I think that what I expect us to see in the next few years, I expect us to see these brains grow a body and become much more material in their ability to impact our organizations and the work we do.
And I think that when while that happens, there's also going to emerge new challenges because today many of the AI security challenges are theoretical or at least mostly theoretical. But, you know, once you have hundreds of millions of cars on the road and the cars are going at 80 mph then the security of car seats, seat belts, airbags move from being a theoretical control to something that saves lives every day. And that's exactly what we're going to see in the AI security space as that AI becomes fully fleshed out and starts to be part of the day-to-day operation of the companies and enterprises and organizations that really, you know, enable our lives. We're going to see the risks materialize in a much more meaningful way in much more frequent occurrences and the need for security that will arise from that will grow as well.
Absolutely. And we'll get to Cyera and how it's evolving and how this AI security is evolving later in the conversation. But before we get there, you recently returned from Davos and we talked a lot about travel over the last, you know, a couple minutes before we started recording. Neither of us going to very warm places at least as of late. But you recently returned from Davos and the World Economic Forum, which look, it's filled with ideas, a place that's filled with perspectives, opinions, conversations. So, just from a personal standpoint, what stuck with you most about the trip, things that may have shifted or expanded, and just the overall conversations that you were hearing when you were on the ground?
I think the thing that struck me the most is that everybody is kind of in the same place right now where on the one hand we all know we're living through what might be the greatest technological revolution in human history. At the same time I think most of us have more questions than answers about how that affects our organizations, how that affects the world. And it seemed to me like every leader I met was in a place of exploration, a place of curiosity trying to reinvent and reinvigorate the organizations in this new AI age. But at the same time a place of much concern and I might even say fear because I think everyone understands that the game is changing and it's changing much faster than it might have in the past but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like and that was a very common thread, very common theme across the board and I think that the call to action for us is simplicity. Right, you know, there's so much complexity in the world around us. Technological complexity, geopolitical complexity, right? What we need to provide our customers is simplicity. Simplicity in the way we help them secure and enable their data transformation. Simplicity in the way we help them enable their AI transformation and simplicity is becoming much much more valuable due to the world's complexity. And I think that that was for me my biggest takeaway from Davos is really hearing these, you know, CEOs and world leaders talk about AI and look for that simple answer to be able to focus their attention on something that can provide an end-to-end solution. That is exactly our strategy at Cyera to become that end-to-end solution for enterprise AI adoption and be able to support every part of that motion from the AI that the end users use to the LLMs that are brought in-house and have access to the company's proprietary, you know, competitive edge data to the way that, you know, you protect yourself from AI misuse and AI data leakage and I think that that simplicity being a full platform, full solution is what I heard these leaders asking for.
And look, we've all been there whether it's, you know, with something like data security or something with much less consequence, right? We hate the complex, right? Like we hate when we're placing an order for something or we're doing a simple task or we're making a call to wherever trying to connect with a doctor through an agentic chatbot and it's just complex, right? Like we hate that. We just want to be simple. We want to be able to know how to do this without feeling like we're jumping through hoops or jumping ropes or going through all this different tape to try to finally find our destination. But I think that wanting to get to simplicity rather than complexity is a lot easier said than done, right? I think you would agree with that. It's a lot easier said than done, right? Everyone wants to be simple, right? But to get there is really, really tough. And now I know Cyera, we talked about the valuation earlier and the recent funding, but it's continued to grow, continued to grow, continued to grow. When you first started, was that simplicity always the goal? Was that something that you always had in mind that whatever you were going to build, you wanted it to be simple so that customers could use it and feel confident using it?
Absolutely. I think that was perhaps the biggest lesson that our customers taught us in the beginning and that is the difference between the optimal solution and the feasible solution. As engineers we sometimes gravitate towards the optimal solution, right? We want to implement technology in a way that can solve the problem in all of its aspects. But the enterprise practitioners, the CISOs, CIOs, CTOs, chief data officers that we work with and sell to have a very pragmatic worldview and they know that the optimal solution might not be feasible, might not be implementable in their organizations. And I think that lesson that they taught us in the early days, how do we reduce friction? How do we make the solution more implementable, more feasible, more usable to the customer? It's been a huge learning for us and it's part of everything we're doing today. And, you know, I think maybe the greatest achievement in the world is to take a complex problem and solve it in a simple elegant solution, right? And that is what we strive to in our efforts. Sure, you can throw a complex solution at it, but then what value does that create? And being able to strive to that simplicity is a lot of the magic of the experience we deliver for our customers today. And a lot of what we're looking at as we're expanding our footprint, growing the problem, right? If yesterday we solved a problem that was this size, tomorrow I want to solve a problem that's this size and in a year from now I want to solve a problem that's going to keep getting bigger and keep doing it in a simple fashion, right? If you lose the simplicity, you lost the magic.
Yep. Absolutely. And like you said, right, like you want it to be simple because you might have a complex solution, but to your point, right, if a company can't implement that complex solution, then what's the point of even having the complex solution in the first place? And so I want to go back to Cyera's beginning because you're sitting there with your co-founder Tamar. You guys are figuring out what Cyera is going to look like in the future in 2026 where we sit now. Was the vision always the same? Was it always a we want to solve X problem, we want to make it simple or did the vision take on a number of different transformations over the course of, you know, where we sit today in February of 2026?
I think that at the pace that Cyera is growing and amassing traction in the market the vision has always to be, you know, several steps ahead. So the vision has grown immensely over the past five years and it continues to grow. Right? I think if you would have asked me a year ago, our scope would have been more limited than it is today because I think that vision is perhaps the most important way to align thousands of people around the mission. Right? If you want to have thousands of people growing in the same direction, all of the Cyera employees and to a degree our customers and partners as well, you have to give them a north star. You have to give them a shining city on the hill that everybody can look to and everybody can make sure that we're all rowing in the same direction. I think that one of the challenges of companies as they grow is that lack of alignment that sometimes arises, the politics and I always joke that I want to have a very very clear vision that everybody can look to and I want to make sure that the goals are so ambitious that nobody has time to take their eyes off the goals and start to find, you know, all the reasons why things are challenging or, you know, why the politicking. Keep everybody aligned on the goal and keep everybody in a very intense motion to get there. And I think that that creates an extremely compelling opportunity for people.
And so I want to pivot the conversation now to just your personal journey. And you served in Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Force, an elite cyber unit within the IDF. What did you just learn about not only cyber but security overall, pressure, teamwork, innovation that still really shows up in your leadership and helps you as you now lead Cyera?
That's a wonderful question. I think the experiences in the military service have definitely been some of the more formative experiences of my life. And to a degree, I think that the same message that I just shared has been really relevant for me at least in my military service. And that is when you have a clear goal, you can get there much faster than anyone would imagine, right? Like when you know what you want to accomplish, what you want to achieve, it's sometimes surprising how quickly you can actually achieve it despite the fact that, you know, when you're at square zero, point zero, you have nothing, right? Like you don't have the right talent, you don't have the right technology, you don't have the right skill set, everything looks so far away. It looks so far away. But if you have clarity of goal, clarity of purpose, the ability to achieve it and achieve it in a very short time frame is immense. I think that that was an exercise that I had several opportunities throughout my military service to undergo where, you know, the realities of the world put a challenge in front of us that we had no clue how to tackle with the capabilities and tool sets that were available to us. And four months later we managed to conquer that goal and find a solution to that problem and implement it because that was what was needed. We had the urgency, the need was the primary driver and we had to be very creative and flexible and competent in order to overcome the call to action.
Now, not everyone goes from military cyber operations to building one of the fastest growing data security companies today. What, away from Cyera, just what drew you into entrepreneurship, right? Was there a specific moment when you kind of realized I need to build something to and ignore whatever the problem you thought might have been around. What just got you into I need to build something to solve problems, right? Like what got you into I want to be my own boss. I want to create something that really makes a difference.
Yeah. So I think there were two elements for me that were incredible. I think the first element was the partnership. So Tamar and Yonatan who were my co-founders and, you know, started the company with them. The opportunity to work with them was something that I couldn't pass up. And I think that that says a lot about the culture of Cyera today as well. We're very very ambitious and we have incredible goals in front of us. But it's something that I always like to remind everybody is that we have to enjoy the journey because, you know, once we get there there's not going to be some cathartic moment where we're like okay we got there now we can be happy. If we're not happy today then we won't be happy when we get there either. So you have to always balance that ambition with the ability to enjoy the journey and really appreciate the journey. I think that the opportunity to work with people that I admired and I held in the highest regard and I knew, you know, will always have my back and will always support me, that was something huge for me and that was the biggest catalyst, you know, to starting the company. I think that from an entrepreneurial standpoint, Israel is very entrepreneurial and it's almost impossible to do something at this type of scale in Israel, not through entrepreneurship, right? Since we don't have the big companies that America has, we don't have opportunities at the size and scale that some other countries might provide. If you want to do something huge, entrepreneurship was pretty much the only option open to us and we definitely wanted to do something that can scale to the international level and be a first class company at the world stage.
And so I want to go back to in one of your previous answers, you talked about setting a common goal for everyone that people can really look towards so that they really stay on task and especially as you scale and as the size of your company and the number of your employees only grows, right? Like it's more important than ever to keep everyone whether they've been with the company since the beginning or are in day one, right? They need to be glued to that common goal, that common mission. How do you really create that environment though where employees they feel empowered, they feel supported, they feel trusted so that they can tackle the challenge at hand that does require really creativity, that high performance, that urgency that sometimes requires that pressure, right? How do you make sure everyone stays aligned with a company growing at the scale that yours is?
I think for us maybe the biggest enabler to that is to embrace failure. And failure is a word that has so many connotations for people, right? Some people say it or just think about it and they get shivers throughout their body. But I think failure is maybe the greatest growth catalyst.
But is it a fail fast type of mentality? Like do you want to fail fast?
Failing fast is much better than failing slow. True. But I think in general the ability within the workplace to say I tried and I failed and this is what I learned from it. This is what I didn't like about the way things happened. This is what I didn't like about the way I handled things or the choices I made and this is what I learned from them. So the ability to do that cycle which sounds so trivial when I say it here now but in reality in how many organizations do people feel empowered to call out their own shortcomings and their own failures? And I think that that is such a core part of the Cyera learning culture is the ability to understand where did we go wrong. What could we have done better as a team and as individuals? And that is always present. No matter how good things are, no matter how good things went, what can we learn? What could we have improved? How can we do better next time? And I think that that attitude that permeates I hope from me and my co-founders personally all the way across the organization enables people to lean in, take chances, experiment, do things that they're not sure are going to work but they might and if they will it's going to be amazing. So, you know, you have to create a culture, you have to create a place where people really feel like they have the place to do that and for us, you know, I think failure is one of the biggest catalysts for growth and progress but it's very important in my mind to be able to call it out and not to sugarcoat it, not to make it seem nicer than it was. How was it? Yeah, it was okay. No, I don't want to shy away from it. Didn't work. You know, we did badly. We did poorly. We messed up. We screwed up. Like, why did this happen to us? And how do we make sure that it doesn't happen again?
And yeah, but I would say that that last point, right, the why of it, right? The why is so important. It's not just okay, we failed, we moved on. It's we failed. Why did we fail?
What can we learn from it? What can we learn from it? How do we extract all the learnings possible from it? Because, you know, that's the only thing we have. And the interesting thing is that when you fail, it's usually relatively easy to know why you failed. And when you win, it's often times very hard to know why you win. So, you know, everybody wants to double down on the wins, but sometimes you don't know how you got them.
