Globes readers have voted for Israeli startup Talon, which has developed a secure and isolated browser for organizations, as their favorite startup, as part of the Globes Most Promising Startups of 2021 ranking.
In April, just two months after it was founded, Talon raised $26 million in the biggest ever seed round completed by an Israeli startup. The company was founded by entrepreneurs Ofer Ben-Noon and Ohad Bobrov. At the time Talon only had a small handful of employees and did not yet have a product. The large seed round was based mainly on the reputation of the two entrepreneurs who had recorded successful exits in the past.
Talon CEO Ofer Ben-Noon had previously founded Argus Cyber Security in 2013, which developed systems to protect vehicles from cyberattacks, and was sold to German company Continental in 2017 for more than $400 million. Talon CTO Ohad Bobrov was one of the founders of Lacoon Mobile Security, which developed cellular cybersecurity solutions and was sold to Check Point for $100 million.
Talon's product was launched at the beginning of October and is designed to cope with what has been defined as the biggest security challenge in the age of Covid and remote work - connecting up employees to an organization's cloud software through their unprotected personal laptops and smartphones. When an employee enters an organization's applications in the cloud from a personally owned device, the organizational protection does not cover them and this increases the risks of data leaks and creates breaches for potential attacks on the organization.
Talon's product aims to replace the various methods used to secure privately-owned computers such as VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) solutions or VPN (virtual private network), which create a secured connection between the employee's computer to the systems that they connect to in the cloud. These methods tend to be awkward and slow.
Talon has developed an Internet browser called TalonWork, which it sells to corporate customers. The browser is built on Google's open code Chromium on which it has built the most popular browser - Google Chrome. An organization that buys Talon's browser has to define that every entry to the organization's cloud services will only be via this designated browser. If the employees want to use the Internet for private use, they must do so via the computer's regular browser so that privacy is maintained.
On the browser built by Talon, there is multi-layered defense that protects the work environment from any damage on the computer and protects against the use of exploiting vulnerabilities on the web to steal data and secures the connection to the organization's cloud servers to prevent data leaks. The browser is in fact meant to create a kind of relatively sterile environment with the operating system of the employee. Talon's browser is also encrypted within the cloud, instead of on the employee's PC, with passwords related to the organization, thus preventing theft from them. Talon currently has 30 employees.
The poll conducted among Globes Hebrew site readers to choose their favorite startup was held on the Apester platform, which attracted 36,000 page views and thousands participated in ranking the most promising startups. Thirty companies, which were the highest ranked by 63 investment funds active in Israel, are competing for the title this year. Among the candidates are cultured meat developers Aleph Farms, the company that supports the bereaved Empathy and the streamer platform StreamerElements.
Globes most promising startup rankings for 2021 will be revealed on Tuesday. This will be the 16th time that Israeli investors from all areas of technology choose the most promising startups from a broad spectrum of sectoprs including cybersecurity, fintech, gaming, and healthcare, which will impact many industries and consumers, and be on track to unicorn status.
This year's Globes most promising startup will join previous winners including monday.com, Lemonade, JFrog, and Mellanox. The selection of Globes most promising startup for 2021 will be announced tomorrow at midday.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 6, 2021.
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