Sunday, whose name refers to the fact that it also protects you when you are not at work, provides senior executives, and eventually their families, with Personal Cybersecurity to head off new types of attacks that go beyond traditional company emails.
Sunday Security exec app and CISO dashboard
Israeli startup Sunday Security has announced that it has raised $4M in seed funding. The company is focused on cyber-risk protection for senior executives, but they don’t consider themselves an IAM [Identity and Access Management] vendor. Not do they even consider the IAM players as competitors – at least for now.
Sunday’s purpose is not to duplicate protections offered broadly against cyberthreats by a multitude of vendors, both large and small. Instead, it is specifically to provide Personal Cybersecurity to protect the key players in an organization, who represent a potential gold mine to attackers should they be breached, which would provide key access to the organization and its data. Sunday focuses on more than just those organization’s corporate accounts, to also protect personal accounts and devices that can also be targeted by attackers. This type of personal targeting bypasses the protections provided by security awareness and anti-phishing programs which have traditionally been the first line of defense against attacks.
Zack Ganot (L) and Shaked Barkan, Sunday Security’s co-founders
“We don’t play in the same field as IAM, managing identities in the workplace,” said Zack Ganot, Sunday Security’s CEO. “What we do is look at the complete persona side. When an IAM vendor like Okta looks at you, they know some personal information – but they look at it from a narrow context. They are focused on ‘is this Zack and can we give him access?’ We look at that identity as mainly persona, in terms of what personal accounts you control. So we aren’t competing with the IAM providers today. We focus on all your own machines, and personal identity within them. Focusing on that hasn’t been a bridge that has been crossed before. We harness people’s personal security to improve overall security by protecting their complete online identities.”
This specific functionality also accounts for Sunday’s somewhat unusual name.
“Our real value add is protecting people outside of the enterprise when they are not at work – like on Sunday,” Ganot said. “Who protects you on the weekend? We had a big poll around the name with investors and we stuck this one in with the one marketing preferred and this was the most popular. We also didn’t want to have another security name that was all about black, dark messaging.”
Ganot said that Sunday’s technology has some unique elements which will eventually be patentable.
“Pipelines being based into personal accounts are unique,” he stated.
As Sunday further develops its product, they have clear roadmap items in mind.
“This first iteration still doesn’t have link analysis and protection, but it is part of its roadmap,” Ganot indicated. “CISOs are very focused on this. We are initially focusing our efforts on the top officers in the enterprise, which for the next quarter is likely to be C level execs and SVPs. Beyond that, we see us making our way down the team, as even some lower-level positions are important to protect.”
The next phase, Ganot said, is to roll it out to the execs’ families.
“Scale has to be built out for this though, as it is getting more into the B2C area,” he noted.
Longer term, the plans are to broaden beyond the enterprise as well.
“We eventually plan to target SMBs, but the enterprise is where we can generate the most ARR, which is important for a new company,” Ganot stressed. “Our technology is really applicable to companies of all sizes.”
The channel will play a key role in Sunday’s Go-to-Market.
“Channels already have relationships and trust with the customers that we are trying to reach,” Ganot said. “Our plan is to launch a channel program by the end of the year. It will be a very unique product for them to pitch to enterprises, because while we do have competitors, we think we have a leg up on them.”
Ganot and CTO Shaked Barkan, who together ran Pandora Security, a cybersecurity consulting firm focused on high-profile individuals, are Sunday Security’s co-founders. The $4 million seed funding round was led by MoreVC, with participation from security executives and serial entrepreneurs including John Donovan, former CEO at AT&T and chairman of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee; Amit Singh, CBO, Palo Alto Networks (PANW); Shailesh Rao, president, Global Go-To-Market at PANW and Tom Kemp, founder and former CEO at Centrify.
