A Year in the Life: Zenity Reaches New Heights in 2023

At Zenity, 2023 was a year of tremendous growth, exciting performance, and important milestones. I am so proud of our team as we strive to support our customers, partners, as well as each other during what was a challenging, but fruitful year for all of us.

Growing the Team Globally

In keeping with my belief that our people are our most important asset, I am proud of each one of our employees for navigating a difficult time and leaning on one another to show support in many ways- we stuck together. We also had tremendous growth where we hired our first six US employees across sales and marketing, and continue to be growing the team in all areas and locations. 

In addition to our market leading platform, we saw the formation of our go-to-market team in the United States execute in the market to showcase to customers the immense value we are able to provide. We had exciting turnouts at massive security conferences like RSA and BlackHat/DefCon, where our very own Michael Bargury brought down the house with various keynote speeches on the risks of guest access, credential sharing, and more. 

Customer Expansion and Product Developments

We also saw exciting, meaningful growth in terms of growing our customer base and recurring revenues. As we take on new customers and have the opportunity to work with different types of enterprises, we are glad to learn about new challenges and leverage these opportunities for self-improvement at every turn. 

We also had an exciting milestone with the closure of our Series A round of funding, led by Intel Capital that allows us to scale the company in all areas and we are extremely grateful for their partnership. From my vantage point, we were able to accomplish this next wave of growth due to Herculean efforts from everyone on the Zenity team who continually introduce new value and coverage to our best-in-class security governance platform such as: 

• Support for enterprise user-built AI Copilots (more on this in a moment)
• Generative AI visibility and risk assessment to determine which apps and automations are created using or leveraging AI
• SBOM for citizen development platforms
• The Zenity Attack Graph to visualize relationships of each individual app and automation
• And much more

AI and Citizen Development. A Match Made in Heaven (but not Security)

One of the key themes we saw from this year was, of course, the rise in AI. AI has delivered on its promise of being one of, if not the most significant technological innovations in history and has changed so much in such a short time. Development platforms like Microsoft Power Platform, Salesforce, ServiceNow, UiPath, and more have jumped on the bandwagon, and introduced robust AI capabilities to help people use their platforms, enabling people to build powerful apps, automations… and even their own AI Copilots. It has never been easier or more available for anyone, be it a professional developer or a finance professional, to build their own powerful business applications and automations. 

However, with the democratization of development, the growth of business systems that have access to sensitive corporate data has exploded. And yet… AI has made that growth even more explosive, with people being able to build apps and automations with simple text prompts. And yet… on November 15, 2023, nearly 1 year to the day of OpenAI Chat GPT’s grand introduction, Microsoft unveiled Copilot Studio. With this new tool, professional and citizen developers can even build their own AI Copilots (agents) that can be used within departments, roles, or entire companies, making the life of security professionals even more challenging. This massive business enabler presents equally tremendous risks for security teams, who are faced with AI Copilots that are being over-permissioned, under-authenticated, and subject to simple prompt injections that can wreak havoc. This type of citizen-led development sits at the crux of what we do; enable businesses to unleash business-led innovation that comes from these types of platforms. 

In one of my proudest moments as CEO of Zenity, on November 22nd and a week after Microsoft’s announcement at Ignite of Copilot Studio, we announced full security and governance support for Copilot Studio, allowing our customers to confidently unleash the power of AI throughout the business. Everyone on the team, from R&D to Engineering to Product to our Sales staff worked tirelessly to curate customer and market feedback to build a product that would serve the market and continue our mission to securely empower citizen development at every organization. We are already seeing several customers who have swaths of citizen developers building their own AI Copilots and using Zenity to secure them and providing value back to the business. 

Full Steam Ahead for 2024

On a personal note, I am hoping and praying for a more peaceful year across the globe. The last several months have been particularly difficult, and am so proud of the perseverance and mental fortitude of our team to stick together and continue delivering value to our customers and partners. 

As we look ahead to 2024 we are going to continue pushing hard and growing our teams across all functions in Israel and the United States in an effort to serve our existing customers and the growing market as demand for securing AI Copilots and low-code/no-code apps continues to hit the mainstream. We suspect that AI is going to continue to find new enterprise use cases, with more people leveraging AI to create amazing and powerful apps, automations, and Copilots that spur the next wave of innovation. Zenity is uniquely positioned to help our customers as they look to security to ensure a sense of calm as these new force multipliers also mean a more interconnected web of digital identities, data, and process automation. 

We have a slew of exciting product updates planned that prove our dedication to continuous innovation and meeting customer needs. We are also continuing to hit the world tour and the Zenity team will be on the road to meet new prospects and partners, participate in new types of events across multiple countries and continents, and we just can’t wait to see how the year is going to develop.