Investment - December 2020
The Janvest General Partnership is pleased to announce the execution of Limited Partnership IV’s third investment in an Israeli founded emerging technology company. Below you will find information about the business and corresponding investment. We welcome your questions and feedback.
DEAL SUMMARY
Company Name / Mirato
Website / www.Mirato360.com
Offices / Tel Aviv
Sectors / Cyber Security
Founders / 2
Year Founded / 2019
Number of Board Positions Held by Janvest / One
Total Janvest LP IV Investment / $1,500,000
Total Size of Round / $5,000,000
Notable Co-Investors / American Express Ventures (U.S.) and Grove Ventures (Israel)
LP IV Ownership / ~10.0%
TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION
Mirato is orchestrating and automating the entire Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) lifecycle for the financial services industry. Banks specifically face an array of complex regulations that require them to assess and manage the risk associated with each one of the thousands of vendors within their network. Given that each vendor comes with a different security posture and strategy for tackling cyber risk, the manual analyses that banks conduct on each vendor can take weeks to months to complete. Once those analyses are complete and the vendor is approved, banks have limited visibility into changing vendor risk until the next annual assessment. In addition, the analysts conducting these risk audits within banks are overloaded and simply cannot process vendors efficiently enough while still complying with the corresponding regulations. As such banks must staff up with more analysts as they on-board an increasing number of vendors, thus making this aspect of their operations a growing cost center that has little impact on their bottom line. And while there are various technologies that assist with vendor risk management, they are fragmented solutions that work in a siloed fashion, each with their own dashboard, value proposition, and functionality. This creates additional headache for TPRM departments as they have to manage, coordinate, and derive value from multiple different tools, platforms, and systems. Enter Mirato, which wants to alleviate this risk analysis bottleneck within banks, while also orchestrating and providing a single data lake through which vendors can quickly, efficiently, and in compliance with regulation move through the bank’s assessment and approval processes. Mirato automatically and continuously collects vendor data from people, documents, machines, and pre-existing TPRM-related technology platforms and provides the bank with a real-time view of vendor risk. This is the first security orchestration solution designed specifically for this fast growing multi-billion dollar TPRM market. By reducing vendor assessment duration and labor per third party, Mirato frees bank analysts to focus on higher value tasks and substantially reduces costs while optimizing risk visibility and operational effectiveness.
MARKET APPLICATIONS
Mirato is initially targeting the banking industry as that has the most substantial need given the increasingly complex regulatory environment. Outside of banking, Mirato has applications within credit bureaus, credit card companies, payments businesses, as well as insurance and ecommerce companies.
MARKET ADOPTION
Mirato has lined up a series of design partners including a number of blue chip multi-national banks and is looking to develop additional relationships amongst tier one banks here in the U.S. Also worth noting, American Express as a strategic investor in this round will also be providing ongoing product feedback as Mirato’s team continues iterating on their solution.
TEAM
The talent and experience across the Mirato team and Board makes this an extremely attractive and promising investment in and of itself.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
Both co-founders, CEO Aki Eldar and CTO Etai Hochman are serial cyber security entrepreneurs — Aki having sold his business Secure Islands to Microsoft back in 2015 and Etai having recently left a highly successful cyber insurance company he co-founded called At-Bay, which has raised more than $50M in venture capital since being founded back in 2017. Aki and Etai are well renowned operators and technologists and have a track record of successfully developing and commercializing complex cyber solutions.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS and ADVISORY BOARD
Aki and Etai have assembled a brain trust that includes some of the best minds in Israel’s innovation ecosystem to advise on strategy, technology, hiring, and go to market:
-Executive Chairman - Gur Shomron / Serial entrepreneur, Chairman of WalkMe, which has raised $300MM+ in venture capital
-Board Member - Mickey Boodaei / Serial entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Imperva (Nasdaq: IMPV) and Founder of Trusteer (acquired by IBM for $700MM)
-Advisory Board Member - Yoram Yaacovi / Former GM of Microsoft Israel and Former COO of Amdocs
-Advisory Board Member - Dr. Ron Dembo / Yale academic seen as one of the world’s leading authorities on risk management
JANVEST VALUE-ADD
Mirato is a spin-out from a well known banking technology incubator in Israel, which unfortunately saddled the company with a very unhealthy cap table that we at Janvest believed would render Aki and Etai unable to raise additional venture capital down the road. Janvest worked closely with the Mirato team and pre-existing investors to lead an intensive multi-week pre-round advisory process aimed at fixing some of these cap table problems and creating a much heathier ownership balance between investors and entrepreneurs. Through this advisory, Mirato is now set up with the appropriate corporate governance and ownership structure that will allow the business to attract best in class financiers to future rounds of funding. In addition to this pre-round advisory, Janvest has already started facilitating relationships between Mirato and U.S.-based prospective design partners such as BNY Mellon.
JANVEST CONTACT INFORMATION
Brian Rosenzweig
Atlanta, GA
Brian@Janvest.com
Dafna Winocur Biran
Tel Aviv, Israel
Dafna@Janvest.com
Daniel Frankenstein
New York City, NY
Daniel@Janvest.com
