Talon

Alfa Bennoon had already proven his ability to build and scale a cybersecurity company. At Argus, he identified an emerging market gap in automotive cybersecurity when connected cars were becoming mainstream, leading to a $130 million acquisition by Continental in 2017. After three years in senior management at Continental, Alfa was ready to tackle a new problem—one he saw crystallizing in real-time: the shift to distributed work.

"When you are bringing such capabilities into a market that wasn't dominated with security issues before, then there would be a big vacuum, a big issue that will come into the world," he reflected on his Argus experience. By mid-2020, he recognized the same pattern emerging with remote work. Employees were using unmanaged endpoints, personal devices, and contractors were accessing corporate systems—all from anywhere in the world.

Alfa partnered with Ohad Bobro, his co-founder, whom he had known since their days together in the IDF's Cyber Intelligence Unit 8200—fifteen years prior. Ohad had previously founded Lacune Mobile Security, the first mobile cybersecurity company. Both had witnessed the same "tectonic chain": when smartphones first connected to organizations, security wasn't a concern; by 2020, it was existential.

They started writing code in mid-2020. Rather than building yet another endpoint detection and response (EDR) tool, they chose a different approach: a corporate browser. "If you think about the alternatives, right, to install a fully managed network filtering or a fully managed ADR on this device, then one of the alternatives that are having the least amount of privacy invasion is actually a browser," Alfa explained. This way, employees know only corporate activity is monitored.

Alfa leveraged his network from Argus. The first customers were major automotive tier-one manufacturers—the same ecosystem that had driven Argus's early traction. These organizations understood the security imperative because they were already early adopters of connected technologies.

By the time of this interview (roughly 18 months after starting), Talon had 12 design partners with plans to reach 20 by end-of-quarter. Critically, the company remained pre-revenue. Instead of rushing to commercialization, Alfa was running a "proof of value" model: several weeks of demonstration to show the product's value, then conversion to paying customers as volume increased.

The pre-revenue phase, while unconventional for most founders, allowed Talon to solve a crucial problem: identifying which pain points were universal across customers versus use-case-specific. "The most important thing is to understand which problems are we tackling for the customers and exactly what are the biggest pain points," Alfa said.

Pricing was still experimental, set at "single digit dollars per device per month"—roughly $5-10 per device (not per employee, since employees have multiple devices). The target customer was organizations with 5,000 to 50,000 employees; current customers ranged from tens to hundreds of thousands of employees, indicating product-market fit potential at multiple scales.

In 2021, Talon raised $26 million from strategic investors including Lightspeed, Team8, and Disciple (which counts George Kurtz and Mark Understone as members). Notably, Alfa sold more than 20% of the company for this round—higher than typical Series A dilution. He justified this through a partnership lens: "Every new investor is actually a new partner for the journey. Choosing right, I think, is critical."

With hundreds to thousands of devices under management across 12 design partners, Talon was positioned to transition to paying customers in the near term. Alfa's capital-efficient playbook from Argus (raising only $30M to reach a $130M exit) gave investors confidence that he could grow into a $100M+ post-money valuation.