Speed Over IP: How a tiny security startup made time-to‑value its moat

When your technology can be copied, make your speed impossible to ignore

I met the founders in 2018.
One was a business operator with a feel for numbers.
The other, a technologist who loved to build and ship.

Together they launched a cybersecurity platform that found brand-impersonation scams—fake domains, cloned log-ins, phishing kits - before they went live.

It wasn’t built on a secret algorithm. In cybersecurity, edges fade fast. Attackers read the same research you do.

Their edge was speed.
Within minutes, their system could scan the web and dark web, find suspicious domains and TLS patterns, and surface a screenshot of a fake site using a prospect’s brand.

No integration. No procurement cycle. Just proof.

And in a world where 93% of breaches start with phishing (KnowBe4), that speed changed everything.

Time capsule: 2018 - GDPR and the phishing boom

It was the perfect moment and a brutal one.

Phishing kits were cheap and everywhere. GDPR had just gone into effect, bringing massive fines. Suddenly, every CISO cared about brand abuse, not just data loss.

But who actually owned the problem?

Marketing cared about the brand.
Security cared about the threat.

As PAN Communications put it, “The CMO owns the brand and the CISO protects it.” ZeroFox called it a grey zone—and that’s exactly what it was.

With no clear budget owner, buying decisions froze.

The product was solid, but it was easy to copy.
If they wanted to win, they couldn’t compete on code.
They had to compete on something harder to clone: speed of proving value.

The challenge: credibility without scale

They were doing the right things, just not at scale.

The product worked. The story made sense.
But the market didn’t trust them yet.

Enterprise buyers equate size with safety.
To a Fortune 500 CISO, a 30-person Tel Aviv startup looks like a risk, not a partner.

They were sitting on extraordinary data—tens of thousands of new phishing domains, behavioural patterns, industry-specific threats—but they treated that data as back-end plumbing.

They were selling a tool, not a window into what was really happening online.

And when you sell like a niche vendor, you get niche attention.
Even when prospects were impressed, the deals stalled.
The company needed a way to look big before it became big—to project authority in a crowded market where every competitor claimed “AI-powered detection.”

The shift: from features to proof, from vendor to authority

The turning point wasn’t new code. It was a new way of showing value.

We reframed the company around evidence.
Instead of explaining how detection worked, the team used its own engine to prove that it worked—instantly.

Before any sales call, they’d run a scan and come armed with screenshots of live phishing pages using the prospect’s brand, along with cross-industry stats showing how similar attacks hit banks, insurers, and healthcare firms.

The pitch stopped being about architecture.
It became about exposure.

Executives suddenly saw their own logos on cloned sites.
They didn’t need to imagine the threat—it was right there, in pixels.

That single shift—from explanation to demonstration—turned the product from interesting to urgent.

The team built an internal “threat library” of images and data they could use across verticals, and started publishing insights from those scans as public threat-intel briefs.

In less than a quarter, their demos felt like breaking news.
And the market stopped seeing them as a vendor with a clever tool—
and started seeing them as a company that understood what was really happening on the internet.

The GTM play: credibility at speed

Repositioning the story wasn’t enough. The go-to-market motion had to match it.

Thought leadership through data.
They published monthly intelligence briefs ranking industries by phishing exposure—real insight, not sales fluff.

Founder visibility.
The CEO became a voice in the industry—talking about brand protection, regulatory risk, and the economics of response speed.

Vertical focus.
They targeted sectors where brand impersonation was a board-level issue: finance, insurance, healthcare, consumer platforms.

Deals started moving faster because the stakes were higher.

The result: a small team that looked like a market leader. Within two years they landed dozens of enterprise logos. In early 2020, Mimecast acquired the company to extend its brand-exploit protection (SecurityWeek).

Founder takeaway

When your tech can be copied, your moat is speed and perception.

Move quickly to land meaningful logos—each one is both revenue and signal.

Talk in terms of executive pain, not product specs.
Look and sound like a company twice your size.

And remember: your data is your real asset.
The more you learn from it, the more authority you build.

In a world where algorithms are commodities, momentum and insight are what no one can replicate.