Israeli cybersecurity startup comes out of stealth with $30 million in funding

Israeli cybersecurity startup Savvy, which came out of stealth mode announcing a funding round of $30 million, has developed a workforce security automation platform for the safe adoption and use of software applications.

The Tel Aviv-based startup has secured $30 million in Series A funding, led by early-stage venture capital firm Canaan, along with the participation of other investors including Cyberstarts, a venture capital fund that invests in early-stage cybersecurity startups, and California-based Lightspeed Venture Partners. Cyberstarts led the startup’s initial seed funding round together with Lightspeed.

Savvy was founded in 2021 by CEO Guy Guzner, CTO Yoav Horman, CPO Eldar Kleiner, and chief architect David Ben Zakai. Guzner previously co-founded Fireglass, an Israeli cybersecurity company acquired for $250 million in 2017 by Symantec.

Savvy’s platform is embedded directly into user work environments to help businesses secure against threats and vulnerabilities as they rapidly adopt and use a multitude of Software as a Service, or SaaS apps to fulfill their work tasks. Common examples of SaaS apps, which allow users to connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser, are email, calendaring, and office tools such as Microsoft Office 365, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Salesforce or ChatGPT.

Businesses and organizations globally were using an average of about 130 SaaS apps in 2022, up 18% from the year before and compared with only 16 in 2017, according to an annual report by Bettercloud.

Savvy’s platform discovers all the SaaS apps employees are using and monitors all action including app signup, generative AI queries, credentials submission, access to sensitive resources and data sharing to prevent potential “user-initiated” security incidents before they happen. Once problematic action is detected users are alerted to the security risk through popups. For example, for ChatGPT, Savvy can alert users through popups to turn off the chat history before submitting a prompt to prevent using proprietary information or sensitive data to train generative AI models.

“Companies can have the highest security budgets and the best systems in place, but if you’re not reaching the end user at the point of decision, then history will continue to repeat itself,” said Savvy CEO Guy Guzner. “Our platform helps SecOps [security operations] gain full visibility and control over all user SaaS touchpoints, including sensitive information sharing in generative AI apps, and our suggestive guidance system helps users understand the risks as they happen and why they shouldn’t bypass security in favor of productivity.”

Savvy’s security co-pilot is tailored to the needs of each organization or business, including customizable security automation playbooks that trigger automated responses to employee actions. The platform reports real-time actionable insights and metrics to security teams to help them identify high-risk areas and do employee risk profiling. It also recommends steps for risk mitigation and tracks improvement over time.

“Savvy’s focus on the ‘human’ attack surface and protecting employees across browsers and work apps solves a massive problem all enterprises face and is only getting worse,” said Joydeep Bhattacharyya, general partner at Canaan. “The real-time nature of Savvy enables security teams to finally preempt employee-initiated events rather than just respond, which is… why we believe Savvy will lead the emergence of an entirely new category of browser and application security.”

Savvy says its platform is deployed by a number of Fortune 500 companies in the hospitality and consumer goods industries, and has a total of over 100,000 active users.