The LightSpin team Photo: David Garev
Just before Passover, it became known that the Israeli cyber startup Lightspin was purchased by the American communications equipment giant, Cisco, for approximately $225 million, as was published today (Wednesday) for the first time in Calcalist.
Lightspin was founded by security researchers and “white hat” hackers Valdy Sandler (CEO) and Or Ezarzer (CTO). The company’s platform allows cloud and cloud security teams to locate various security problems already at the configuration stage, prioritize and fix them easily. The platform allows detection of all possible problems, even if they are in different aspects, and their smart prioritization according to a graphical analysis that uses the “attacker’s approach” to understand the potential impact of each attack.
Lightspin uses tools and algorithms based on graph theory and provides a quick and in-depth view of the cloud infrastructure configuration, analysis of potential attack paths, and locating the root of the problem – which are the most critical weaknesses that hackers can exploit.
In the past, Valdi Sandler, CEO of the company, explained to Gigtime that because the platform operates from the perspective of the attacker, it is able to find any possible weakness, small to large, that threatens the organization. Unlike other security solutions that usually look for significant security issues, and generate a large volume of alerts that are difficult for the security team to deal with.
So far, Lightspin has raised about 20 million dollars. In the seed round of the company, it raised 4 million dollars led by Ibex, and in the A round, only half a year later, it raised 16 million dollars led by Dell and with the participation of Ibex. The two are expected to yield a fairly handsome coupon considering the fact that, according to estimates, the return will be almost 10 times the investment. According to the report, all 50 of the company’s employees will join Cisco.
Nice return for investments
The romance of Cisco and the Israeli market did not start now. In fact, Lightspin is the 16th Israeli company to be acquired by the American media giant. In 2021, Cisco purchased Apsagon, only 4 years after it was founded, for about 500 million dollars. In 2020, Cisco acquired Portshift for an undisclosed amount. This is the second major exit published in March, and comes after at the beginning of the month the Israeli startup Axis was sold to the software giant HPE for about half a billion dollars, 5 years after it was founded.
Gigtime’s new app
