Siemplify Co-Founders Alon Cohen, Amos Stern, and Garry Fatakhov

Siemplify: Why We Invested

Rising Above the Noise

There’s no doubt the cybersecurity market is massive, with room for sustained growth as IT and network infrastructure world-wide is under the constant threat of attack. Given the magnitude of this opportunity, there is no shortage of smart, committed entrepreneurs are hard at work right now building products to address the broad scope of cybersecurity issues. CB Insights recently produced a market map of the space, reflecting 106 players and 4 segments, each already with a “unicorn” valued at $1B+.

Therein lies the issue for new companies in the category.

How does a new entrant rise above the noise in the market as they compete for the attention of customers, and often, for venture investment?

Introduction

We were introduced to the Siemplify team by a respected friend of the firm and quickly scheduled a first meeting phone call. My expectations weren’t high given the crowded cybersecurity market, even though I assumed the team would be strong and product interesting given the referral. Those assumptions proved true as the team did an excellent job of describing how they brought unique skills from their past experience in Israel’s intelligence agency and training security operations analysts in commercial and government settings to the development of a new platform for an enterprise’s Security Operations Center (SOC). They clearly understood the problem and had developed a fully integrated end to end SOC platform that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of security analysts and dramatically reduces the time to mitigation of active threats. The value proposition was clear, but the open question of whether their solution was sufficiently differentiated to capture the attention of prospective customers. That question was answered definitively by the company’s current and prospective customers.

The Siemplify Threat Analysis Platform automatically correlates security alerts, identifies and prioritizes incidents, and graphically depicts the complete threat chain. The platform acts as a central hub linking an organization’s existing security, threat intelligence and risk management tools, including Splunk and popular SIEMs.

Smart Money & Smart Customers

Siemplify was angel funded in 2015 by a collection of investors that is exceptionally knowledgeable about the cybersecurity market. The team rapidly developed their first commercial product and got it in the hands of a number of very challenging potential customers. Conversations with these customers — all of whom have exposure to the full gamut of cybersecurity solutions — proved to be the deciding factor in our commitment to Siemplify.

It’s also worth mentioning that the R&D team resides in Tel Aviv, Israel, while the CEO and commercial team are newly established in New York. We’d have been less likely to make this investment without a strong local partner in Israel, a partner we found in our friends at 83North who had led the seed investment and then co-led this Series A round with us.

Bottom Line

In the end, Siemplify checked all the boxes of a great team with a deep understanding of the customer problem, a unique and protectable solution, a large and growing market and a great investment syndicate partner. Conversations with knowledgable customers proved to us they had the potential to rise above the noise of a crowded and competitive marketplace, and all that, combined with the early validation of their product/market fit, actually made this one a pretty easy decision.

Welcome to the team.

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