AI access control co Knostic wins Black Hat startup award

Knostic founders Gadi Evron and Sounil Yu credit: Knostic
Knostic founders Gadi Evron and Sounil Yu credit: Knostic

Three months ago Israel’s Knostic took first place in the startup competition at the prestigious RSA Launch Pad cybersecurity conference.

Earlier this week during the Black Hat conference, the world’s biggest cybersecurity conference, early stage Israeli AI startup Knostic took first place in the main startup competition. This was not the first competition that Knostic, which was founded last year, 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, the cybersecurity startup he had founded to US venture capital fund Stage Fund. CEO Evron’s partner at Knostic is CTO Sounil Yu, former chief security officer at Bank of America.

The two conferences at which Knostic took the first place prizes each year attract the biggest players in the cybersecurity world, including technology giants like Microsoft. As part of the competitions held at conferences, it is customary to highlight the most interesting and promising companies in the industry every year, and winning first place provides prestigious credibility for the future.

So how has Knostic stayed under the radar? In its initial fundraising, even before an official seed financing round that it will announce later, the company raised $4.5 million from Pitango, Shield Capital, DNX Ventures, the European venture capital fund Seedcamp, as well as angel investors, including Kevin Mahaffey who founded the cybersecurity company Lookout and David Cross of Ryan Capital.

Knostic VP operations Jonathan Braverman tells "Globes," "The company engages in a very special way in assisting organizations to implement generative artificial intelligence tools. Models don't know how to filter content, chats don't know how to think about the context of the conversation and this is exactly where we come into the picture."

Knowing what questions to ask

Knostic allows organizations to securely run an internal organizational search based on large language models, to help avoid the risks associated with unauthorized access to sensitive information by employees and the possible damage to the organization as a result. "We know how to present the smart chat that the organization uses with questions that are adapted to it in order to locate points of information leakage, and then present this to the security managers and they adjust the authorization network accordingly," explains Braverman.

The vision, he says, "Is to edit the answer received from the model so that it fits and meets exactly the needs of the person who asked the question, among other things by adjusting the content. If, say, the finance manager and the marketing manager ask for the sales forecast for the next quarter, the answer that each of them needs to receive is completely different. A finance manager wants to see the profit, and the marketing manager looks at the customer. We try to inform the model about the implicit context and then it produces better answers, with information tailored to the questioner."

Kostic is currently in the product deployment phase for pre-purchase testing. However, it has already installed the technology it is developing for three corporate customers, and the company says there are already contracts on the table for the rest of the year. In the field where the company operates, there are already several rivals, such as Varonis, Portera, Forcepoint and Sentra, "But each one does a different part of what we do as a whole, so it is difficult to point to a main rival," explains Braverman.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 15, 2024.

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.

Knostic founders Gadi Evron and Sounil Yu credit: Knostic
Knostic founders Gadi Evron and Sounil Yu credit: Knostic
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