Talon, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that’s promising to solve the problems that come with the pandemic-era workforce, has raised a $26 million seed round. That’s the biggest ever seed round in Israel, according to Crunchbase data provided by the company, despite Talon being months away from releasing a product.
The startup, which is coming out of stealth on Sunday, is hoping to secure the newly-distributed workforce brought about by Covid-19, where more people are working from home and taking data away from the more secure confines of their employers’ networks. Talon’s idea is to take a work device - any smartphone or PC - and seamlessly segregate the personal use from the work use. That will see every app cordoned off from another, though Talon cofounder and CEO Ofer Ben-Noon is reticent to provide any more specifics about the tech for fears of giving competitors an edge.
Talon cofounders Ofer Ben-Noon and Ohad Bobrov.
Talon“Assuming that some [malware] has been installed on your PC, due to that, that could easily then jump into the organisation, or track everything that happens on on your device... the software-as-a-service applications, the cookies, everything that you do,” Ben-Noon tells Forbes. The solution, he adds, is to separate a device into two environments, so that it’s possible to “isolate everything that happens”.
Whatever they’ve built, Ben-Noon and cofounder Ohad Bobrov have impressed investors at Team8, an Israel-based startup foundry and investment company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The funding will go on growing the team by around 30, according to Ben-Noon. Though a significant seed round, it’s not the biggest for a cybersecurity company this year. ActZero, a Silicon Valley startup that has created artificial intelligence that helps security teams look for threats on the network, announced a $40 million seed investment in March this year.
Part of Talon’s attraction is their founding team, both of whom oversaw significant exits from previous startups. Ben-Noon cofounded Argus Cybersecurity, which promised to protect cars from cyberattack and now claims its tech will soon be protecting as many as 50 million cars on the road. It sold to Continental for nearly $500 million. Bobrov helped set up Lacoon Mobile Security, a smartphone-focused cybersecurity business that sold to one of Israel’s biggest tech businesses, Check Point, in 2015 for $100 million.
Both Ben-Noon and Bobrov served in Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit, famous not just for its NSA-style surveillance of communications networks, but for churning out many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Those same entrepreneurs continue to thrive. Even as the pandemic strikes down some businesses, it has presented opportunities for the likes of Talon to make hay from a changed world.
