IONIX Names New CEO and Expands Management Team to Lead Next Phase of Growth
Differentiated Solution in Fast Growing External Attack Surface Management Market Led to 250% ARR Growth in 2022
KIRKLAND, Wash., Jan. 11, 2022 – IONIX (formerly Cyberpion), a cybersecurity leader in external attack surface management (EASM), today announced that Marc Gaffan has been named Chief Executive Officer. Additionally, Doron Gill will serve as Vice President of Engineering, and Ido Samson joins as Chief Revenue Officer. Co-founder Nethanel Gelernter is moving from CEO to Chief Technology Officer where he will focus on accelerating innovation and scaling IONIX’s EASM platform.
“We experienced strong growth in 2022 and see even more opportunity in the year ahead,” said Gelernter. “Bringing in experienced, proven growth executives like Marc to scale the business will allow me to focus all my energy on product innovation and differentiation. EASM is a growing and competitive market, and we are seizing this opportunity in 2023.”
Most recently, Gaffan was CEO of Hysolate, an endpoint security startup that was acquired by PerceptionPoint. Gaffan also served as co-founder and CEO of Incapsula, a global cloud application delivery service that was acquired by Imperva. Gill joins from Logz.io where he held a similar position. As head of engineering, his focus will be on scaling the engineering organization to accelerate development and feature velocity. Samson joins as CRO from Hysolate where he served as Vice President of Sales.
“Fully understanding and managing the organization’s external attack surface has become a major concern and a high priority for most security teams,” said Gaffan. “A large area that is currently being overlooked by many organizations is their hyper-connected attack surface, the third party infrastructures that their systems connect to and are reliant on but are out of their control. This can be up to four times larger in size and significantly more complicated to manage and control. From an attacker’s perspective, it’s part of their playing field as they try to hack their way into the organization’s IT fabric.”
“The EASM market is an expanding segment of late, as unfettered cloud migration and the broader trend of digital transformation drive an explosion of public-facing assets on the internet. The security challenges raised by this situation are leading organizations to adopt more proactive security approaches like EASM, both to complement and reduce the workload of reactive technologies such as XDR. This has driven a lot of M&A activity over the last couple of years, as larger security vendors have become aware of the need to move into this space, but there is definitely still room for innovative start-ups with a differentiated way of working, like IONIX,” said Rik Turner, Omdia Senior Principal Analyst, Cybersecurity.
2022 Milestones
2022 was a transformational year for IONIX. In February, the company announced $27M in Series A funding led by U.S. Venture Partners and including existing investors Team8 Capital and Hyperwise Ventures. This investment was used to scale the organization, from accelerating product innovation to attracting top talent in all areas, from sales to engineering, product management to marketing and operations.
IONIX is unique among EASM vendors in its ability to provide full visibility of the connected digital supply chain. IONIX not only discovers customer assets, but those of connected business partners, subsidiaries and brands – across hybrid environments on-premises, clouds, managed services and Shadow IT. This differentiation helped the company achieve 250% growth in annual recurring revenue and allowed the company to double its headcount. The company was recognized by global industry analyst firm Omdia with an On the Radar report and was chosen as a Baby Black Unicorn by Cyber Defense Magazine.
CEO Marc Gaffan has published a blog post you can find here.
