AlgoSec - policy from the application's point of view

AlgoSec was founded by Yuval Baron, its chief executive, and Avishai Wool, its chief technical officer: in 2004 by the company's own account, in 2003 by Wool's own CV and by Globes. Its core technology predates the company: Wool, who created its Firewall Analyzer, had been a member of technical staff in the Secure Systems Research Department at Bell Labs from October 1996 to March 2000, and then co-founded Lumeta, which began in 2000 as an internal Lucent start-up. Baron came from Comverse and RAD Data Communications, and had co-founded Actelis Networks in 1999.

The problem it addresses is one every long-lived estate has and few organisations admit to. A firewall rule set accumulates: rules are added for a project, an exception, a migration, a supplier, and almost none are ever removed, because nobody can prove what would break. After a decade the rule base is a record of every decision the organisation has taken and an explanation of none of them.

What the category does is turn that into something answerable. Which rules are unused, which are shadowed by others, which permit more than the policy allows, and what a proposed change would actually open - questions that are trivial to state and impossible to answer by reading, once the count passes a few thousand across several vendors.

The detail worth carrying is financial rather than technical: it ran self-funded for fourteen years before taking outside investment. A company can do that only if customers pay early and keep paying, which says more about how badly the problem is felt than any market sizing would. Unglamorous categories with genuine operational pain do not need venture money to find buyers.