Earlier this week, during Black Hat, the world’s largest cybersecurity conference, an early-stage Israeli AI startup announced Knostic Knostic, founded last year, took first place in a major startup competition. This isn’t the first competition Knostic has won. Three months ago, Knostic took first place in the startup competition at the prestigious RSA Launch Pad cybersecurity conference.
Knostic has 12 employees, including nine in Israel. The company was founded in 2023 by entrepreneur Gadi Evron, who in 2019 sold Cymmetria, a cybersecurity startup he founded, to U.S. venture capital fund Stage Fund. Evron’s partner at Knostic is CTO Sounil Yu, the former chief security officer at Bank of America.
The conferences where Knostic wins first place each year attract the biggest players in the cybersecurity world, including tech giants like Microsoft. As part of the competitions held at the conferences, it is customary to highlight the most interesting and promising companies in the industry each year, and winning first place provides prestigious credibility for the future.
But how has Knostic managed to stay under the radar? In its first funding round, even before the official seed round that will be announced later, the company raised $4.5 million from Pitango, Shield Capital, DNX Ventures, and European venture capital fund Seedcamp, as well as angel investors including Kevin Mahaffey, who founded cybersecurity firm Lookout, and David Cross of Ryan Capital.
“We’re in a very specific way of helping organizations implement generative AI,” Jonathan Braverman, Knostic’s VP of operations, told the Globes. “Models don’t know how to filter content, conversations don’t know how to think about the context of the conversation, and that’s exactly where we come into the picture.”
Knowing what questions to ask
Knostic enables organizations to securely conduct internal enterprise searches based on large language models, helping to avoid the risks associated with unauthorized access to sensitive information by employees and the potential damage to the organization that could result. “We know how to deliver the intelligent chat that the organization uses with adaptive questions to identify information leak points, and then present that to security managers who adjust the authorization network accordingly,” explains Braverman.
“The vision is to tailor the answer we get from the model to meet the needs of the person asking the question, among other things by adjusting the content,” he says. “If, for example, a CFO and a CMO ask for sales forecasts for the next quarter, the answer they need to get is completely different. The CFO wants to see profit, while the CMO looks at the customer. We try to give the model the context, and then it produces better answers, with information tailored to the questioner.”
Costik is currently in the product deployment phase for testing before purchase. However, it has already installed the technology it is developing for three enterprise customers, and the company says it already has contracts on the table for the rest of the year. In the space the company is in, there are already several competitors, such as Varonis, Portera, ForcePoint, and Sentra, “but each one does a different part of what we do as a whole, so it’s hard to point to a major competitor,” Braverman explains.
This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on August 15, 2024.
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