Transcript
funding round, the AI native platform raising $400 million in a series F round led by Blackstone managed funds with the participation of big shot inside investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Joining us live in studio is Sierra founder and CEO Yotam Segev, Yotam, great to see you in person. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. So let's start with this $400 million, this raise that you've completed, what do you plan to use the money for? Product, product, product, and more product, AI is generating new security problems that just didn't exist before and the need to build incredible software in order to enable the enterprises that run our lives to adopt this AI technology and do it securely is greater than ever. And we're investing in our product, investing in our engineering, making sure that we're going to deliver the best platform in the market for our customers. So you think about cyber threats, I mean, this has been one of the biggest risks that CEOs have named that they're thinking about for years now. I have to imagine that AI and the speed at which AI is developing, of course, complicates that picture. But when you talk about these products that, you know, you're going to be putting this money to work in, I mean, how much of it is anticipating where these risks are going to pop up? Yeah, I think that, you know, AI in the way that it operates is really changing the game for cybersecurity. And every enterprise is thinking about how to adopt AI, but they're also thinking about all the risks that are arising from it. This is a new world we live in, and most of us barely understand it. That's the truth. We're all in anticipation of finding out how this would look, what the agents are going to be like, what are they going to change in our lives and the way we operate our businesses. But the unknown is much greater than the known. So I think that laying the right foundation, being able to understand what the fundamentals of enabling this transformation for the enterprise are and doubling down on them today, that is the most important thing for enterprises to do. I am curious, when we talk about the benefits of AI to corporations, we talk about that a lot on this program. It makes things more efficient. In theory, you would need fewer people, and you can potentially do more. However, if you're a criminal, I would also assume you could also use a lot of these same AI tools to make your operation, your criminal operation, more efficient. So how do you sort of keep pace with that, knowing that the technology that you're trying to build out to protect those companies, the criminals are also using similar technology to exploit those companies? Absolutely. I think AI is changing the threat landscape very quickly. Obviously, the criminals, the hackers, are not subject to regulation, nothing slowing them down from adopting the AI. They don't have to be careful, and we very much want our leading enterprises to be careful. So I think that the challenge there and the friction there is meaningful. For us, our job is to help the enterprises be able to say yes to AI and to say yes now. Explain though how exactly your platform helps protect them. Is this just basically a proverbial gate, if you will, or is it more integrated into their operations? Yeah, absolutely. So if you think about AI, AI runs on two things. It runs on chips, and you talk about those quite a bit with NVIDIA and all of these amazing, amazing companies. And it runs on data. And the first wave of AI we've seen gives us answers based on the internet, right? The data that's out there. The next wave, the wave that we're in now, is giving us answers and is acting on the company's proprietary data. And this is a new way of processing that information. It's more efficient. It's more promising. It has incredible value to offer. But the existing security controls are just unable to protect the data within these systems as they're being leveraged by AI. Sierra is building the solutions to enable our customers to give the most meaningful data to the AI engines, but stay in control of it, keep it protected, and make sure that they're getting value and not downside. Well, I'd love to talk a little bit about your future plans for Sierra, because this is your Series F round, so we're getting further down the alphabet. Your valuation, again, tripling to $9 billion. That's certainly bigger than a lot of the small caps we were just talking about. How are you thinking about the public markets? Could an IPO be in your future? We're thinking about building an amazing company. And I think that if you have a great business, customers that love you and value what you provide for them, there's many, many options of how to realize that value. Obviously, with the public markets being as they are today, it looks very promising. But who knows? When the time is right, we'll consider our options. We're definitely making sure that we have all the right doors open. All right, Yotam. Great to have you here. Yotam Segev, he is the CEO and founder of Sierra, which just had a new funding round led by Blackstone. The value is a cybersecurity company of roughly about $9 billion.
