While most cyber startups focus on big Enterprise customers, we’ve built Cynomi with a different mission in mind. We want to protect as many small & midsize companies as we can from their next cyberattack. We believe that the main gap these companies face is a strategic one: due to their size, their corporate structure doesn’t have a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), and we believe we can bridge this gap with AI.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
When I completed my military service at IDF unit 8200 and served as technology director at Israel’s civil cyber authority, I consulted many businesses and was astounded to discover the difference between the state-level cybersecurity I used to manage, and the state of the cybersecurity at midsize businesses that I encountered.
After interviewing many of these companies, I found a common theme: the gap was in the lack of expertise, as these businesses did not have the equivalent of a CISO in an enterprise setting. Cybersecurity responsibility was often handed over to IT, and yet IT and cyber are two overlapping but very different disciplines.
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How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
Most of our company’s life so far has been during the pandemic, which meant fundraising, recruitment, and customer meetings were almost exclusively done online. In fact, the two parts of our team – the Israeli and British – have not yet met face to face, and a recent full-week hackathon bringing them together last December had to be cancelled at the last minute due to COVID.
This meant we needed to find ways not only to work together remotely but efficiently, but also to socialise and get to know each other on a more personal level. It’s been working well, but we’re still keen to get everyone under the same roof for at least a full week.
What can we hope to see from Cynomi in the future?
At present, we provide a platform for service providers to sell and scale their virtual CISO services. Gartner expects the percentage of small and midsize enterprises using a virtual CISO to go up from 1% to 20% in 2022 – an unprecedented increase in such a short period of time, and Cynomi hopes to play a meaningful role in this transformation.
With the $3.5M funding raised in the recent seed round led by Flint Capital we are planning to scale our R&D efforts and expand and strengthen our presence in the US and UK markets. In the future, we will make our product available not only to the managed service providers but directly to in-house IT teams.
