Investment - December 2025
DEAL SUMMARY
Company Name / Secoro
Website / Coming soon
Offices / Tel Aviv, Israel
Sectors / Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence
Founders / 2
Year Founded / 2025
Number of Board Positions Held by Joule / One
Total Joule LP V Investment / $1,000,000
Total Size of Round / $3,000,000 (Pre-seed)
Notable Co-Investors / Ibex Ventures (Israel)
LP V Ownership / 9.0%
DEAL DYNAMICS
For over a decade Joule has been heavily investing in the enterprise developer. From Coralogix, ControlMonkey, and Pynt to Arnica and now Secoro, we believe that software developers and engineers have become and will remain the engine behind corporate growth and future shareholder value especially as it pertains to the building, integration, and utilization of Artificial Intelligence. Given our experience and success in bringing developer-focused solutions to market, we have become a first stop for entrepreneurs in this space. As such, our Israel-based Partner Dafna Winocur Biran was approached by an acquaintaince of hers, Yossi Amara, Chief Information Officer at Outbrain (NASDAQ: TEAD) and the company's former VP of Cyber Security. Yossi intended to leave Outbrain and start a new company with the aim of securing the developer environment. While the value is ultimately amongst developers who want to use new technologies to enhance their productivity and output, the company's buyer is amongst senior information/cyber security executives.
Over the last few years we at Joule have stayed away from cyber solutions given the feature versus business building that has become so prevalent in today's cyber market. Particularly in Israel, where the number of cyber deals executed is growing 50% year over year, largely led by the big multistage funds, round rightsizing and valuation discipline have gone completely out the window. Hype and headlines have taken priority and created a dynamic amongst Israeli cyber companies where they have too much capital and too high a price for immature businesses with next to no revenue. This dynamic was not what the Secoro founders were looking for amongst their initial investors -- they wanted to work with people they know and trust and who would be a guiding light for them in terms of best business practices, not what achieves the next overpriced funding round. As such, they specifically sought out Joule and likeminded funds to join their journey and be a partner as they build a category creator.
As a byproduct of being in Israel's cyber community for so long, the Secoro founders were a bit off market in terms of what they wanted to raise initially. Joule worked diligently with both Yossi and Ibex Investors, another VC wanting to commit to the company, to get them to raise a more risk mitigating amount of initial capital, thus giving Secoro the ability to catapult into a much larger round 18-24 months later with real revenue, proof points surrounding early product-market fit and a more enticing valuation for future investors. Ultimately the Secoro team chose to execute on a $3M pre-seed with Joule and Ibex co-leading the round with $1M each and $1M being invested by prominent Angel investors in the Israeli tech community.
TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION
Data exfiltration breaches are defined as an unauthorized transfer of sensitive data from a computer, computer network, or system. According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average global cost of a data breach this year was roughly $4.5M. In the U.S., that cost has been significantly higher, $10.2M per incident, as a byproduct of more expensive regulatory penalties and remediation tools and services. More data exfiltration breaches are being directed at developers given their extensive access to organizational data, mission critical source code, and secrets. JFrog's (NASDAQ: FROG) study on the hidden costs of Developer Security Operations (DevSecOps) indicates that enterprises spend on average $28K per developer per year on security-related tasks such as manual application scan reviews, context switching and secrets detection. Despite the awareness around developer security risks, the problem is only growing as those developers increase their reliance on open source code packages, external databases, as well as extensions and AI agents designed to enhance developer efficiency. An example of the vulnerability these 'developer endpoints' create can be something as simple as a spell check plug-in. Like all employees, developers use these spell check plug-ins; however, unlike others they use them in their developer environments where these plug-ins can execute malicious code. With the proliferation of AI-powered productivity tools designed for the developer's Integrated Development Environment (IDE) where they write and run code, a new frontier of risk is emerging. Today, developers are downloading and running AI tools freely and because of the intelligence of these tools, they can autonomously execute actions inside the IDE, which has the potential to wreak havoc on an organization and its clients. The rapid evolution of the developer workflow and toolstack has left enterprises with limited visibility or control over developer environments.
Secoro was founded on the basis that AI is actually making the developer endpoint a more attractive attack vector. Last year 87% of organizations claimed to have been attacked by AI-driven cyber attacks. Of the 3,000 data breaches in the U.S. alone in 2024, 13% had their own AI models and applications turned against them. This trend will increase exponentially in the coming years. With Secoro, organizations can gain full visibility into developer machines and everything running in their environment and prevent in real-time exfiltration of code, secrets, and data without disrupting developer workflows and software production velocity. Below is a graphic that highlights some of the benefits that Secoro brings to enterprise developers AND security teams:
MARKET ADOPTION
Secoro is at a pre-revenue, pre-product stage in their development, thus the pre-seed size investment we are executing. Despite their early stage, Secoro has already secured multiple 'design partners' -- small to mid-size tech companies that are willing to jointly work on product development. Most of these companies are in Israel and it is Joule's objective to begin introducing Secoro to U.S.-based customers and partners through which they can accelerate commercialization. One of the most attractive aspects of Secoro is the synergies they have with Endpoint Detection & Response companies like Sentinel (NYSE: S) and Crowdstrike (NASDAQ: CRWD), as well as companies in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) market such as JFrog (NASDAQ: FROG) and Snyk (pre-IPO). While these aforementioned companies are dominating adjacent markets, we believe that Secoro has the opportunity to be a first mover in the Developer Endpoint Protection (DEP) market, which is both set to grow exponentially in the coming years, and is generally seen as a white space to capitalize upon. Within 18 months Secoro wants to be at roughly $1.5M in annually recurring revenue from which the company could catapult into a larger financing round indicating a more mature business with early product-market fit.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
CEO Yossi Amara is considered a visionary within Israel's technology ecosystem. For the past 12 years he's been leading security and technology adoption for Outbrain (NASDAQ: TEAD) where he rose from VP of Cyber Security to the company's Chief Information Officer. Prior to Outbrain, Yossi headed up Corporate & Cyber Security for Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX). Within these organizations Yossi built, scaled and led cross function collaboration in cybersecurity, compliance, IT, information systems, procurement, and AI.
CTO Sam Agranat is an exceptional technical talent who served five years in Unit 81, Israel's most elite cyber warfare and intelligence division. In addition to his technical excellence, Sam also has strong interpersonal skills and succeeds in explaining complex technological details to business users - a necessity often overlooked by Israeli cyber companies. Prior to starting Secoro, Sam was a Senior Principal Security Researcher at Talon, a cyber security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW) for $625M in 2023. Sam also previously ran a cyber consulting firm helping organizations with the development of their security solutions.
JOULE VALUE-ADD
Joule's efforts to rightsize Secoro's round will both preserve the health of the company's cap table while also de-risking the business from a valuation perspective. Too many founders in today's market believe the end-game is raising as much money as possible at as high a price as they can obtain not realizing the disastrous effects this has on their ownership and the probability of a successful outcome. When we realized that Yossi and Sam were inadvertently replicating the mistakes of so many of their peers in the market, we stepped in, guided them 'off the ledge' and reset the round in a way that gives them optionality around future financing or M&A transactions. In addition, Joule is also helping Secoro attract a number of additional strategic angel investors who have had experience and success in the cyber domain.
