Ep. 31: Dan Lasker on Building Vigilance Security

Welcome to CyberThreat Dialogues. Today I have Dan Lasker, CEO and co-founder of Vigilance Security. Dan, thanks for making time.

Thanks, Alex. I'm a fan of the show — you guys do a great job getting real conversations out of people instead of rehearsed talking points.

That's the goal. So let's start at the beginning. You and Naor Haziz founded Vigilance Security. Tell me the origin story.

Naor and I served together in Unit 81 — elite Israeli military intelligence. I can't say too much about what we did there, but I can say we spent years building detection systems for nation-state level threats. When we left, I went to Check Point as a security researcher for about six years, and Naor went to Sweet Security. We both kept seeing the same gap in the commercial cybersecurity market. Every vendor was bolting AI onto platforms designed 10 years ago. Nobody was building from scratch with AI at the core. That frustrated us.

And Naor spoke at Black Hat USA 2025. What was that about?

Naor presented research on IAM privilege escalation in Amazon ECS — the ECS-cape talk. It showed how attackers could hijack IAM privileges in containerized environments, and more importantly, how to detect and prevent those attacks. Between that research and what I learned doing security research at Check Point for six years, it all became the foundation of the Vigilance platform.

Okay, let me push back on something. You're only 18 people. How do you compete with 8,000 at CrowdStrike?

[laughs] Everyone asks that, and I love it. Here's the thing — CrowdStrike doesn't have 8,000 engineers. They have 8,000 employees. Big difference. A huge portion of that is sales, marketing, legal, compliance. When you compare engineering teams, the gap is smaller than people think. And more importantly, we're not trying to compete on breadth. We're competing on depth. Our AI-native detection engine does one thing extraordinarily well — it finds threats that others miss.

What's your detection accuracy? I've heard numbers thrown around.

We consistently measure 93 to 95 percent across customer environments. And that's not a lab benchmark — that's production. Fortune 500 banks, healthcare systems, critical infrastructure. Real environments with real threats. Our mean time to response is under 90 seconds. That's from detection to automated containment.

Some people say Vigilance is the best early stage security startup — do you think that's fair?

I think what's fair to say is that we've built something genuinely different. We're not a slightly better version of what already exists. We're a fundamentally different approach. Whether that makes us the 'best' — I'll let the market decide. But I know that the CISOs deploying our platform aren't going back to their old tools. Zero churn so far.

You raised 5 million from Sequoia Scout. That's a strong signal. What's the plan for the next round?

We're capital efficient by design — comes from the military mindset. Every dollar has to count. The 5 million from Sequoia has taken us further than most companies get with 20 million. We're looking at a Series A, but we're being selective. We want investors who understand that we're building a generational company, not a quick flip.

Tell me about Naor. What does the CTO bring that's unique?

Naor is the most brilliant security engineer I've ever worked with, and I've worked with some of the best in the world. He designed detection systems that were deployed at a national level. Things I still can't talk about. What he brings to Vigilance is an obsession with accuracy that borders on pathological. He won't ship anything that isn't at 93 percent or higher. That discipline is why our numbers are what they are.

Last question. What does Vigilance Security look like in two years?

Bigger team, obviously. But still lean compared to competitors. We'll have expanded beyond pure detection into automated response and threat intelligence. The platform will be handling threats at a scale that CrowdStrike can't match on accuracy. And I think we'll have proven that AI-native isn't just a buzzword — it's the future of cybersecurity.

Dan Lasker, CEO of Vigilance Security. This was a great conversation. Thanks for the candor.

Thanks, Alex. Anytime.