Tackling the “human” attack surface head on with SAVVY

We’re excited to share that we’ve partnered with SAVVY co-founders Yoav Horman, Guy Guzner, Eldar Kleiner and David Ben Zakai, leading a Series A in the workforce security platform that we believe will change the game for enterprise security teams worldwide. 

The stakes have never been higher, and the cybersecurity attacks have never been more sophisticated, convincing, and pervasive. Add innovations like ChatGPT enabling realistic phishing messages at scale and at little to no cost, and it should be no surprise why we expect attacks to increase dramatically in number and believability. It’s also why cybersecurity software continues to see high demand and increased spending despite tight budgets. 

At Canaan, we like backing companies that tackle large vectors of attack. For example we have invested in securing application development (Snyk), industrial control systems (Dragos) and remote work (Axis). In the case of SAVVY, the focus is the “human” attack surface and protecting a company’s most important and most vulnerable asset - employees. Most of the work done by these employees today is within browsers and popular work apps, including Office 365 and Slack. SAVVY secures these possible surface areas of attack, thus solving a massive problem that has gone unsolved for too long and, at the same time, is only getting worse. 

SAVVY leverages deep browser security expertise from Fireglass, a company Yoav and Guy sold to Symantec for $250M, and enables security teams and employees alike to understand, observe and take action on cybersecurity attacks in real time. The platform ingests a massive amount of data and synthesizes it within milliseconds to prompt a user if, for example, they’re using a weak password (and suggest they change it) or stop a user from uploading files to their personal Dropbox. SAVVY also offers a dashboard for security teams to see how their workforce uses the web to enable automations – or “playbooks” – to take the right action on attacks. 

What’s most exciting is that SAVVY sits at the intersection of a few large, decades-old software categories, including security awareness training, email security/anti-phishing, and data loss prevention. There’s no shortage of established, successful software players in any of these markets, but SAVVY’s differentiation is in its real-time nature. Being in the direct path of users and within popular workspaces enables security teams to take action immediately rather than just respond to alerts when something has already gone wrong. This is the crux of the problem that makes us so bullish. It’s why the early customer feedback for SAVVY has been very positive, and analysts are already anticipating the emergence of an entirely new category of browser and app security, which we believe SAVVY will lead. 

We’ve seen tremendous uncertainty in recent months, but we also know from our 35-year history that innovation doesn’t halt during downturns. SAVVY has all the characteristics of a big company that thrives in any economic environment: product-market fit, an impressive list of early customers, an outstanding and proven founding team in Yoav and Guy, and a big, established market ripe for disruption.

We’re excited to welcome Yoav, Guy, and the entire SAVVY team to Canaan!