Hi everyone
So, my name is John Copeland
I'm the managing director of Cisco investments here in amia and we are the venture arm and M&A arm of Cisco
We are on the venture side. We are investing around 200 million dollars a year
mostly in the enterprise software
security
In the enterprise is a super important area to us as a company. We just spent 2.4 billion dollars
earlier this year
Acquiring a company called duo security and I'm very happy to have with us one of our investments in
The in the security space, which is behavior sack that we've done earlier this year. So Neil, thanks for thanks for coming
maybe you can tell us a little bit about
Yourself behavior sack and some of the disruptions in the security space that you guys are writing off of these days. Yeah. Sure
yeah, and thanks for inviting me along John and
So, my name is Neil Costigan. I'm CEO at behavior sec
my own background is I've been
I'm a cryptographer. I guess by training and a software developer by trade
but I've been CEO at behavior SEC now about 10 years, I think was the oldest guy in the room was asked to
Take the lead, but I had prior to that
actually
I've done this journey before
taken an idea in security from Sweden where we have SEC was founded and and to California and a successful I said
And then sometime in the industry as I ran or indeed for Gemalto one of the big security companies
But behavior seg is a Swedish company by origin
It's a university spin-out from the University in the far north of Sweden in in a city called Lully
oh, I opened the wilderness there and
We had a couple of undergrads
Came up with this idea that you could identify or verify people by how they interact with their device
And so I ran into him about 10 years ago. So I'm in ten years at the helm. It's been quite a journey
and you know we've grown from
From that University span out at incubation lab to seed funding back around
2011 and you know getting our first customers and growing it to the point, where here
Right, but on it it is your s with disruptions in the industry
Securities one these areas that's really hard at this rope. There's a lot of I guess
You know worry or risk people are like sure it works
does it really do what it says, you know, so there's been a lot of can a lot of the technology things like
You know calculators and smart cars not that the base technology is coming from the early 70s
I mean, it's really going all the way back there. So there hasn't really been too many big big changes
but recently I
Think with the explosion of mobile and the explosion of mobile services people realize that this kind of kind of enterprise security
The kind of thing that was suitable inside the military or inside a bank. They try to take these things
PKI and smart cards and calculators and and apply them in the consumer world and give them out in retail and the user experience
is horrendous, you know, that was a specific problem and
You've invested hundreds of millions in this digital platform, you know things like banking or mobile payments you need the security
But people weren't using them or are not really engaged that much that the outer band SMS is where's the calculator?
You know
there's a smart card fit in the phone or whatever and people will try it try the second time and kind of stopped and
So there's been a big change
Where technologies like ours?
Fit in a different approach that's more kind of user friendly and user friendly would be the big driver
Where you're trying to take that complexity and the cost away from the end user
and kind of put it in in the background or in the network or in the
Fraud or the security there and make the decisions there. So people who understand those complex questions actually are answering them
So we're part of a wave of
Interesting technologies all taking slightly different approaches to put transparency and take friction out of the equation
So one of the things that I thought was really interesting when we first started talking
Was the way that you guys have approached security with the actual product itself, so it would be great
For you to explain to the audience how you guys are an always-on product?
Not just you know, you're not just president and login
But you're with me the entire time and in the journey
Well doctor not to be one of the key. So it's a bid to just step back a bit
But what we do is behavioral biometrics and how we define behavior
There's a number of ways of doing it, but we define it as how you interact with. Say the device or your browser website
It's it's it's how you type
It's how hard you hit the keys how much of your finger?
You're pressing on the key and what pressure you put in there and when you're finished typing in say your your you know the number
how much area of your finger is sitting there on top of the keys and that so it's that it's the rhythm of typing and
The depth of touch how you hold it?
Um, and the phones are you know?
There is amazing amount of sensors available for us to get this and it's kind of a a mixture of Moore's Law
Giving us the computing part to do it
breakthroughs in algorithms in machine learning which a bit buzzword bingo here
But machine learning and Big Data have helped us kind of jump up a bit
Say we regard to the quality of the biometric we can do
But finally is that thing you were saying is that and it doesn't need to be the gatekeeper
It's not like the door with the password or that you know that you get in and then you can do what you want
We're doing it all the time
We sit there and every time you move across the page every time of the screen every swipe and movement we can in real time
Provide a score of how likely the person is
So they say they are
And if it's not them, maybe who is it or is it a is it a bot or malware attacks?
There's a few use cases that are pretty appropriate but the key is that it's no extra steps in front of the user
And a real-time score that's happening continuously all the way through through a session
so
Maybe you can tell some folks here about some of the customer wins that you've had some of the you know
The growth that you've seen because when we when we first started talking you already had tens of millions of users
so yeah, it's been a really impressive and we
You know in this area security this customer is pretty shy about saying the security systems to God
So if I could get some of the big logos, we've had to fully go out and mention
the use case is the reason the amount of the ROI the amount of fraud we've prevented and the cost savings against the
Legacy security systems just disappear. No brain, isn't it really would unfortunately, there are very reluctant insight to do it
We've got a couple what joining you in the investment on ABI
or came in as one of our top customers who really believed in the
technology and you know that endorsement was huge for us besides yourselves the credibility that's given us and that's a
fact but as you say we're out to tens of millions with
an insight target to be over a hundred million paid users by the end of the year now, that's
Ambitious and it's one or two big big big production
Pilots that are out there forests that double America's those numbers, but I just said tens of millions a year by year
It's it's it is pretty cool
So so maybe you can tell folks a little bit about the the funding journey you've been on we came in
At the series B. Yeah earlier this year
But you've you know obviously had had a journey that's been you know
He said ten years in the making so he can give people
You know entrepreneurs in the room some idea of what that's what that's entailed
The journey is a little bit
European kind of focused where we did get great support from the Swedish government
Agencies the innovation the university kind of connections as we set up so access to things like incubators
funding and support for things like the patents and I you know that we have
was kind of all there at the early stages and so we got to a point where
Conor ventures from from Finland led the seed round back in 2011
And that's when we called year zero when we raised a million actually got a million euros
I made a million users about the same time. So that was the interesting point
We've got great support from DARPA in the u.s
part of the
The success we've had is that we've been working quite a lot with the security services in in DC who are also an early adopter
but then
Octopus ventures here in in London and North Zone the big kind of Nordic powerhouse. I believe they're London centric now I came in in
2014 and helped us move beyond the Nordics to pretty much you know, our wins over the last few years
We're all across Belgium Holland, Germany
Switzerland France
you know big digital banks adopting technology and that kind of
That that activity caught the interest of Silicon Valley and and so trade in cybersecurity who are now Forge point
led around
taking after puss Eric's investors
Yourselves and an ABN and we'd really a mission
To help us, you know take the success here and replicated in North America. So we've been out there
We relocated headquarters to San Francisco. We've imported a great team as serious
senior experience kind of product marketing company marketing
And sales, and they've kind of given is we would be viewed I guess is a very technical
over-engineered european swedish
Technology company and now we're getting that lift. That's California and Silicon Valley does so well
In around our messaging and it's about I think sales and marketing execution in North America and through the channels
It's the current activity
Great. Well, we're really excited to be on board with you. We're looking for, you know, big 2019
And to continue the journey with you
From here on out. So thank you very much and thanks for having us on John and thanks for the support then
There'll even be a visa. Actually you would say it's it's been a major
Impact particularly as we engage in North America that we tried Cisco behind us
So it's been a bit of a game changer for us. Thank you
Thank you
You
