Hitting “Ludicrous Speed” with Zscaler

Well that was fast …. A mere 26 months after we started Avalor, we’re getting acquired into Zscaler. But far from an end, this step is the most exciting new beginning we could have hoped for. We’ll continue to operate independently as a complete Avalor team, and we’ll have all the tailwinds of the amazing Zscaler resources helping us “go to plaid”! (Hat tip to Mel Brooks.) We can’t wait to get going.

To see how Zscaler detailed this exciting news, check out the press release.

Not your typical security acquisition

Security acquisitions happen frequently, but this case is different (and no, not because it’s us who’s getting bought). The typical scenario is that one of the larger security companies buys a startup that did one small thing so that the bigger company can gain a particular technology or get into a slice of the security market they don’t yet serve.

These “point product” acquisitions can be a small technology “tuck in” or can launch a new service or product offering. But rarely do they affect the larger company’s standing in the industry. It might sound a bit boastful, but I’d argue that’s what we have the potential to do in this case.

The Avalor platform is the first of its kind – a Data Fabric for Security™ that lets companies aggregate and correlate their security information to enable continuous risk management. We’re the oddballs in security — that crazy set of data people who hadn’t built security products before. But we recognized that organizations were being held back in their ability to understand and reduce risk because they had no effective means of organizing and extracting deep context out of their security data.

Zscaler has put enormous focus on investing in AI to leverage the wealth of data the company handles — 400 billion transactions a day! By building on the flexible, extensible data model at the heart of the Avalor Data Fabric for Security™, Zscaler now has the opportunity to dramatically advance the state-of-the-art in security insights. Together, we can enrich and contextualize the data across both the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform and the 150+ third-party sources Avalor already supports. By applying the power of AI to this breadth of data, we can help organizations automate security operations across vulnerability discovery and prioritization, attack path and kill chain analysis, and threat remediation and prevention.

No other security company today has data platform capabilities anywhere close to this scale — nor the technical expertise to build them. We firmly believe we can help Zscaler leapfrog its competition in bringing these powerful data correlation and AI capabilities to enable unique security insights for customers.

What an accelerant

As excited as we are for everything we bring to Zscaler, we’re equally excited about what this combination will mean to Avalor. Tapping into the amazing business Zscaler has built gives us an unfair advantage in accelerating our ability to fulfill our mission to organize companies’ security information and make it actionable and useful.

We get instant access to a set of resources it would have taken years for us to develop organically — 7000 customers, 4200 channel partners globally, near-ubiquitous customer awareness, and the validation of a $2 billion business behind us. All on our own, we’ve managed to land an impressive set of Fortune 500 customers — the advocacy and heft of Zscaler means we now get to jump to Spaceballs' memorable “ludicrous speed.”

Some very big thanks

Kfir Tishbi and I are incredibly inspired by the potential this combination of companies unlocks. In our quick two years here at Avalor, we built an amazingly talented team – and the feeling of working with the best and brightest to bring about a major change in how companies protect themselves … well, there’s really nothing like it. We have felt since our earliest days just how special this team is – we’ve loved the intimacy and camaraderie. With Zscaler keeping us an independent BU, we’ll remain a cohesive team, but we also realize that dynamic is forever changed.

It took a lot of work for us to earn this amazing vote of confidence from Zscaler — we're so grateful to all our teammates at Avalor who shared their talents, their passion, and their incredible work ethic to build this unique technology and deliver the amazing results we did in such quick order.

We also feel deep gratitude to a lot of other folks, people who believed in our vision of using data to build a more secure future. We owe enormous thanks to Lior Simon and Gili Raanan of Cyberstarts, the first to understand our vision and the team that led our seed round; Morgan Gerlak of TCV, who led our A round and has been an amazing supporter; Doug Merritt, former CEO of Splunk, who joined us as a board member and shared so many insights on how to scale a company; and Nowi Kallen and Kartik Gupta (Salesforce Ventures), Danny Hadar and Assaf Jacobi (Jibe Ventures), and our amazing angels Efi Cohen and Ran Sarig (founders at Datorama) who were always there to lend a helping hand.

Much love to our families who supported us every step of the way! Dona and Orly — we love you!

Thanks to our talented team and this broad Avalor support network, today we get to start an exciting new chapter — our "Zavalor" chapter! With apologies to Mel Brooks, hang onto your "Schwartz" because we’re “going to plaid!”

And as ever, we will ... Be Healthy, Be Creative, Rise.

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