Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are honoring startups across the region's innovation space. Here's the honoree in the cybersecurity category.
As more companies transition onto the cloud, they face an increased risk of data breaches. One Silicon Valley company hopes to use artificial intelligence to help companies catch these breaches sooner.
Merav Bahat, co-founder and CEO of Dazz Inc., built the company at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, looking to tackle the root cause of data breaches.
“It has truly ingrained in me the importance of staying laser-focused, making quick decisions, and having an unstoppable drive to achieve our goals,” Bahat said in an email interview. “I’ve learned to appreciate how important talent and culture are. As an Israeli, it has also taught me how to cultivate a global company culture and embrace diverse perspectives.”
Strategically, Bahat based her company both in the Bay Area and Israel to capture a global consumer base and a market that San Francisco-based Grand View Research Inc. pegged at $202.7 billion last year, with growth projections of 12.3% each year through 2030.
Dazz has close to 100 employees across its offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. And Bahat said its system has even been adopted by companies like Blackstone Inc., Emerson Electric Co. and Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG, a 2022 Fortune 500 company.
According to a report done by cybersecurity platform Trend Micro Inc., software environments that are set up incorrectly on cloud platforms account for up to 70% of data breaches. The report further added that these types of flaws are considered the most significant risk to cloud environments.
Dazz’s platform allows cybersecurity teams to use AI, large language models and automation technologies to first find and then prioritize fixing flaws in a software’s configuration. In short, the software is designed to compile and sort through data breach alerts and notify security teams where and what codes need to be fixed.
The company claims its platform allows users to close these risks within hours instead of weeks. Getting to the problem quickly is a financial imperative: In a report last year by IBM, the average cost of a data breach for companies using clouds is $4.63 million.
Bahat, a former general manager of cybersecurity business at Microsoft Inc., said she needed a change of pace and to pursue something new. She left her job at Microsoft in 2020, talked to hundreds of chief information security officers and tech executives, and decided to establish Dazz to deal with the accelerated growth of cloud security.
“We had a very strong founding team, but we needed to choose where we would focus our energy — an area of unmet need and pent-up opportunity,” Bahat said. “We were challenged by the idea of addressing a neglected problem within a new market and made a daring choice to develop a solution that would both expedite remediation and also reduce exposure.”
Bahat said the founding team — Tomer Schwartz, the firm’s chief technology officer, and Yuval Ofir, vice president of research and development, and herself — intentionally built the platform to forge a new path in the sector. There were times she said they thought they should have opted to solve an “easier problem.”
“Looking back, I believe that our decision to venture into this ‘blue ocean’ of cybersecurity became our most valuable competitive advantage,” she said. “It fueled our customer obsession and kept us highly attuned to the industry’s needs as we developed our product.”
Bahat said the company hopes to better integrate AI capabilities within its platform to streamline the process. She is also quoted saying the company is looking to gain unicorn status in the near future.
Though Bahat’s career has been fueled by her drive to create solutions, she said this expedition has been the best one so far.
“While I had the opportunity to work in global and successful organizations throughout my career, building my own company has truly made a mark on how much I value the people who joined us on this incredible journey,” she said
About Dazz Inc.
- Location: Palo Alto
- Industries: Cybersercurity, software
- Founders: Merav Bahat, Yuval Ofir, Tomer Schwartz
- Founded: 2021
- Funding: $60M
- Major investors: Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Cyberstarts, Insight Partners
- Why they were chosen: Cybersecurity is a crowded space with a huge potential payout: The global market is $200 billion and counting. Dazz stormed out of stealth in 2021 with a plan to put AI to use to spot flaws in software before a breach can occur.
