Today Dig Security is coming out of stealth, and we are excited to be joining them in their journey as an investor and partner. Like most VCs, we talk to a lot of startups, and it’s often a difficult decision about whether this is “the one” that we want to commit to. For Dig, it was surprisingly easy. From our first conversation, it was clear CEO Dan Benjamin was an expert storyteller who could clearly lay out the problem at hand, why it needed to be solved, and why Dig was the team to solve it. The three co-founders, Dan, Ido Azran and Gad Akuka (first initials D-I-G — get it?), are all second-time founders tackling a problem they have first-hand knowledge of based on their previous roles

Databases have been with us since the 1960s. During those 60 years, we’ve seen massive changes in the way databases work, the types and volume of data they store, and where they store it. We’ve also seen a massive movement toward monetization of data, both by legitimate enterprises and criminal organizations, making those datastores juicier targets than ever.

As the cloud becomes the default place to spin up new datastores and migrate old ones, we need to rethink not just data storage, but data security in general. We cannot continue to rely on models that were designed before S3 or Database-as-a-Service was a thing. On-premises solutions were designed for different attack vectors and rely on different network and endpoint capabilities. Dig is rethinking data security from the ground up with a focus on what new risks and opportunities cloud brings.

It’s been a while since I’ve been a database administrator, and that’s probably for the best. The threats today’s DBAs, Chief Data Officers, and security teams need to defend against are a lot more dynamic than I ever had to worry about. I hope that by working with Dig, the industry’s first data detection and response (DDR) solution, we can help make their jobs a bit easier.