How Coro CEO Dror Liwer grew Coro to $100M revenue and 13.5K customers in 2024.

next speaker just closed a $100 million series D we usually don't celebrate funding but I'll celebrate the funding here because he's also very transparent he's a natural teacher we're going to dive into the story the security SAS space today and how he's broke 50 million bucks of ARR please tell me welcome to the stage dra lure of k.net Jor it's great to have you again thanks for being back come on up here um did I get the numbers right it was $100 million series d the series D was 100 million total raised so far was just north of 280 and the valuation on the series D was about how much um the Press has conf has stated that we don't state it publicly but the Press said it was 750 MH and uh and they were pretty close okay press is generally generally close so 750 okay great let's go back to the origin story so you got going I mean when do you guys when was the first line of code written for k.net would you say the first line of code like the MVP uh 2014 2014 so we still see like pretty small Revenue up to really like it looks like 2019 here right what took so long to get to revenue that's a great question um so we are a cybercity company for those of you who don't know we Target mid-market and small businesses and uh initially you like that right I love that throw back I love that I love those colors still to this day I think orange is my favorite color from a branding perspective I got overruled by my partners uh but basically we started off like every other cyber security company uh trying to sell a niche product into the Enterprise Market very quickly understood that that market was um uh not very uh receptive to new ideas um started um really morphing the product got uh the product to be a lot more complete continued to sell to the Enterprise and then I remember the board meeting where I presented on a big graph saying here's where we are selling here's who's buying maybe we should sell there and what was there this was uh mid-market and small businesses midmarket and small okay that really love the Simplicity that we uh created that really led the whole concept of an all-in-one so we slowly grew the product from a very Niche product to a platform that covers basically everything that a midmarket or a small business needs try and ignore everything you've learned over the past years because I want people to like get get in your head in this moment of time when you pick push on this website the thesis was that you were selling what was it to to to to police group it was uh trying to uh so so the attack Vector was called com jacking which uh is a name I actually coined and the whole concept was preventing a man- in the- Middle attack uh on in the wireless realm so either Wi-Fi or cellular it's very very easy for an attacker to step in the middle and basically intercept all the traffic and then either manipulate the traffic steal the traffic or whatever and uh yeah so when we went to sell this people said oh that's a great technology we had patents we won awards and everything but uh but people said it's too much of a such a specific Threat Vector uh that it wasn't really um they weren't willing to spend money to prevent it it's not about just a spending the money they weren't willing to add one more thing to the stack I see that's a very um when you look at it from the eyes of uh Chief Information Security Officer or an IT person adding something new to a stack has additional costs mhm uh which is why cyber secur is so broken MH uh because you need to have layers and layers and different tools an average company on the Enterprise side will have 40 different cybercity products that they've bought each one of them has a massive um side cost not just the cost of the software but the team the training the the uh the uh maintenance and so for and so on let's push this forward and I want people to take a snapshot in their head so they can follow along with the story right so this is the funding history right first off you had three co-founders I think right uh three co-founders other than me so four total did you guys do the easy thing 25 each yep fair enough he owns it 25 each was it a simple as that you're like okay Pizza beer 25 feels right let's go it it was uh we all brought so much to the table so it was clear that each one of us has equal value and therefore we should have equal share and you're running for president soon I am running foral very I'm saying very very political answer but no it is what it is but okay so anyways you start with 25 25 and then you're first seed round series a 5.5 million 2016 I mean most people were selling 20% in their seed round would you fair was it around that just around that yeah okay so that was like called like a 20 million valuation you were still though pre a million 2 million of AR in 2016 right in 2016 we were zero zero okay yeah yeah so you don't really do that big round until 2018 20 million and if we go back to the revenue graph we still see basically no zero or zero in that range what was being valued at the time was it the patents um it was both the patents and the potential okay because we started Focus we I think we really showed that the potential was phenomenal um smbs are the least protected um animal in the in the business world and if you wanted to know how big that opportunity is we can ask this audience I think all of you are what we would consider smbs under 2,000 employees how many of you actually have endtoend cyber security that you can trust uh covering your devices the network the cloud the email and the data yeah no some people three people by the way for the rest of you 40% off on cororo if you go to k.net SAS openen oh he's a I've rarely meet an engineer that can sneak in a sales pitch at the same time that was very good do it one more time because it was so good coral.net SAS openen 40% off on our entire I love that that's great all right so but but here's an interesting thing every body in this room will spend easily 50 bucks a user on CRM but they won't spend $15 a month on Cyber SEC until they get hacked and pain until it's too late right you're selling you have that's the problem with what you sell right is you got to sell that pain and no one will pay for until they feel the pain so let's talk about the story though right so you're going from this you learn you learn you learn 2015 2016 you learn you learn okay now this is the new messaging 2017 yes so basically in 2017 we created this all-in-one MH uh that covered basically um Extended what we've originally done so we were very much in the network space then we extended it to SAS on the one end and to the device on the other end and we launched it in uh 2017 we called it secure cloud and that's really the the uh the time where we noticed that the Simplicity the concept of all-in-one was really uh attractive to the ICP that we weren't even considering MH the midm market the small business uh you know um 20 to 2,000 employee range uh which you know all four Founders come from the Enterprise world and to us this was a uh sort of like an epiphany that there was a market and they were buying and they were interested so you keep learning from 2017 2018 2019 now this is what your website looks like in 2019 feels more enterpris right less words less colors more direct right using Office 365 G Suite Dropbox you know plug Us in uh let's go forward you keep learning you keep learning here's what you look like now in 2021 you've expanded the industries you're serving Healthcare manufacturing which of these six sort of Industries was making up the most of your Revenue in 2021 do you remember uh actually I would say pretty equally distributed one of the things we're super proud of is the fact that uh we are very evenly spread across verticals so we're not exposed in any way to a specific vertical tanking or something like that like uh uh and we've all had our battles cars where you sell into Financial Services and then 2018 happens and everything gets uh shut down uh so we're very proud right now uh we see two specific spikes uh and this is where you're at today right so you're trying to Brand this idea of sort of modular cyber security as a brand yeah correct so right now we're seeing two spikes in education and in automotive uh and that's because these two industries have suffered a significant amount of attacks in the last couple of years so they were waking up to their reality and understanding that they need to make that investment and we made that investment extremely easy for them to make yeah because it's an allinone it's 15 bucks a month for the entire platform per user very easy to digest I mean from a consumer perspective I'm most concerned about Automotive cyber security because I'm terrible I always think about worst case scenario but again I drive a Tesla and they brag about the fact they can push updates any night but I'm also like crap if anyone wanted to kill me they would hack Tesla and drive my car off a cliff while I'm in it uh if you do that times a million cars on the road at the same time that's like a major terrorist attack waiting to happen yeah so I mean could that actually happen or are you seeing enough protocols in place with these iot devices our uh security doesn't...