Congratulations, Demisto!

Today Demisto announced that it’s joining Palo Alto Networks and we couldn’t be more excited.

We first met the Demisto founders more than four years ago when they were just getting started. Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava, Dan Sarel and Guy Rinat had a simple idea for a complex issue: They wanted to help overworked and understaffed security operation teams—by creating a workbench for their playbooks, automating their work plans into action, and enabling them to efficiently collaborate to resolve security incidents at speed.

Through ongoing interactions with CISOs and our diverse security portfolio companies, we immediately recognized the importance of a solution like Demisto to arm enterprises against their ever increasing number of cybersecurity attacks and knew we wanted to help. We led Demisto’s Series A and we didn’t stop there, participating in every subsequent round and supporting their company building as its largest investor.

The founding team had deep experience in start-ups and cybersecurity, including stints at McAfee and a heritage in the heralded IDF, and so it’s no surprise that Demisto quickly established itself as critical security platform for global enterprises that have experienced a breach, an exceptionally chaotic and vulnerable time.

Demisto automates incident response across disparate security environments. Instead of security ops engineers working in silos on tedious and time consuming manual assessments when no one has a minute to spare, Demisto handles all of that to help them quickly and efficiently identify what happened and what to do so they can get it fixed and get back to business. Indeed, Demisto’s platform actually does what many software products only claim to do: it reduces complexity and increases efficiency.

In many ways for companies today, it’s not preventing the initial hack that matters—the reality is you have to assume that you have already been hacked—what matters most is how a company responds to it. Speed, data, mitigation, notification, and identification are all factors in responding. And the sooner and more efficiently this can get done, the better chance of containing and remediating a breach before real damage is incurred.  

Demisto levels the playing field for the "good guys". They took a very old school and manual process and used data and modern day machine learning techniques to make it smarter and more comprehensive—while it sounds quite logical today, at the time the company was founded, it was an entirely new approach and along the way, they also pioneered and lead the Security Orchestra & Automation Response (SOAR) space.

While I know that Demisto was on a successful trajectory to become a category-defining, independent company, they’ve obviously found an incredible partner in Palo Alto Networks who will help them bring their SOAR platform to even more companies overnight. We're thrilled for everyone on the team and to have been a small part of their journey. Thank you Demisto team—Congratulations!