S12 Bonus: Intercepting Risky Prompts and Deploying Local LLMs to Neutralize Data Leakage via Pragatix with Yoav Crombie, Co-Founder & CEO of AGAT Software

[SPEAKER_00]: And we targeted as an enterprise ready.

[SPEAKER_00]: You want AI, you want to use it safely inside.

[SPEAKER_00]: You just deploy for a graphics and the next day you have already AI working connecting to your data.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the other part of the product which is related is the firewall.

[SPEAKER_00]: The firewall has two or three layers actually.

[SPEAKER_00]: One is about

[SPEAKER_00]: Analyzing, given with visibility and control, what your employees are doing, which AI services are using, what are they using it for, what are the level of the sensitivity?

[SPEAKER_00]: We have now evolving the agent controls, which agents are used, what type of tools they are using, these agents, what are they trying to achieve and real-time control.

[SPEAKER_00]: And lastly, we have a model risk, firewall.

[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Joav Krombi, I'm a co-founder and CEO of Agat who has developed Pregatics.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is Code Story.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Who built the teams that have their bad company, is it's that teams help each other achieve this proud of our team.

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[SPEAKER_01]: Total waste of time.

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[SPEAKER_01]: All this and more on code the story.

[SPEAKER_01]: by your host Noah Labhart.

[SPEAKER_01]: In today, how you have crumbi is building a platform centered around AI.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you can have smarter workflows, fewer clicks and full control.

[SPEAKER_01]: You'll have Crombie was born and raised in Israel, serving in the army for six years as an engineer.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's been in the tech industry for 35 years, but doesn't see this work as work.

[SPEAKER_01]: He thoroughly enjoys what he's doing, especially with what is going on with AI right now, specifically around the quick creation process.

[SPEAKER_01]: Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years.

[SPEAKER_01]: He loves water sports, kite surfing, regular surfing, and paddleboarding.

[SPEAKER_01]: In addition, he loves to cycle, and was the Israeli road champion many years ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: You'll have realized that businesses were struggling to implement and adopt AI.

[SPEAKER_01]: In particular, he noticed that there was risk in publicly sharing data, but alongside that, other companies wanted more control of how AI functioned for their company.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, his company started to build a solution to solve both of these problems.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is the creation story of Purgonics, a product of A-Gat software.

[SPEAKER_00]: During my career, most of my time I were around cybersecurity and together with my current partner, we started by developing an application firewall, specifically it was for Skype for business back then, it was a pretty vulnerable product installed on-prem and potentially could give access to attackers to enter the network.

[SPEAKER_00]: Even before that, we started actually with developing a solution for securing emails on mobile.

[SPEAKER_00]: This technology was purchased by Simantec for 15 years ago, I think.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we are a lot in the cybersecurity and most of our experiences with highly regulated customers.

[SPEAKER_00]: We were able to sell our...

[SPEAKER_00]: Application Firewall back then to 25 Fortune 500 while staying very lean company very small we never left our offices all of our sales were done remotely even before the age of Covid and today is pretty straightforward to do everything remote.

[SPEAKER_00]: Back then, it wasn't a common approach, but I liked it, I like where I live, I like to be surfing cycling, if I don't like travelling.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm happy I managed to build a company around that.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we started with these type of solutions.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've getting good understanding of what does it mean highly regulated companies.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what does it mean to deploy a product on-prem and all these five-order restrictions in heavy bureaucracy and procedures and protests?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big challenge to deploy a product in large enterprises, but once you're there, it's typically pretty sticky, so they don't end up changing over-equipped.

[SPEAKER_00]: Realizing these companies, having struggled to adopt AI once AI revolution started, it hit us with the idea that we can offer them a platform that enables to use or implement AI in a secure and private way.

[SPEAKER_00]: To the concerns we've seen with our customers, that while using AI, you expose all your data to the model, obviously,

[SPEAKER_00]: for our type of customers, especially if you're talking about all of your company data being known, let's say, to some AI model outside of your control, for other companies, it was not allowed because of regulations or contract they signed like military, but there's also even a population of customers that don't even have any internet access, because they're so secure.

[SPEAKER_00]: So these type of customers,

[SPEAKER_00]: came to us and brought the idea how can we enable AI still protecting our data.

[SPEAKER_00]: The other related problem is companies that are comfortable in a way of using public AI like CHPT and so on, but had to have visibility and control to what is done with AI what if the level of sensitivity of the content shared and to have visibility and control.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is exactly what Pragatic offers it offers two approaches.

[SPEAKER_00]: For customers that are highly secure, we offer the AI suite we call it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a set of AI services, which is installed without any internet connectivity needed.

[SPEAKER_00]: It can be completely air gap.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it connects to your data sources and it acts like a chat GPT for employee for your company data.

[SPEAKER_00]: It connects to your emails, to your documents, to your internal sites, everything you have, and you can ask question, perform searches, and this week of services.

[SPEAKER_00]: Evolved beyond just chat, so it calls, or today, obviously, the ability to run AI agents and the anomaly detection to classify a set of services and we targeted as an enterprise ready.

[SPEAKER_00]: You want AI, you want to use it safely inside.

[SPEAKER_00]: You just deploy for analytics and the next day, you have already AI working, connecting to your data.

[SPEAKER_00]: The other part of the product, which is related,

[SPEAKER_00]: is the firewall, but the firewall has two or three layers actually, one is about analyzing given visibility and control what your employees are doing, which AI services are using, what are they using it for what are the level of the sensitivity.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have now evolving the agent control, which agents are used, what type of tools they're using, these agents, what are they trying to achieve and real-time control.

[SPEAKER_00]: And lastly, we have a model risk firewall.

[SPEAKER_00]: So for large companies that have a team of developers,

[SPEAKER_00]: They tend to like to download models from hugging face to other sources that potentially can bring also some threats.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we have a firewall that analyzes the model, so it checks, for example, with behind the model and it runs like a runtime red teaming to find vulnerabilities, whether it's protecting against jailbreak king or font injection.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, wrapping back a high level, we enable AI, we enable AI for companies that have problems or restrictions from using AI.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have a new interesting direction by the way, which is the side result of the visibility.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can give you like intelligence into adoption, so it's only not only about security.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some companies want to know if AI is used effectively in their company, but we have dashboards that are showing you who's using AI, what type of usage, and giving like tips and tricks encouraging users to use it more effectively.

[SPEAKER_00]: And also security-wise, if we detect that users continuously perform risky operation with AI,

[SPEAKER_00]: So we can point them for training or alert the managers and things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's, we call it behavior intelligence.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've told me what you would consider the NDP for progress, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, at what would be the first, you know, piece that you built, the first part of the platform that you, you set out, you built and then you started to, you know, get some feedback on.

[SPEAKER_01]: Tell me about that process and what sort of tools you're

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's an evolution to be honest like everything and I must say we have changed our product several times during our career and especially in the AI.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we started with the AI before all of the CHAPT revolution.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we started by training our own AI model.

[SPEAKER_00]: We had a team in Ukraine of people that were manually classifying data, we started with an idea that today is so common of analyzing meeting and summarizing meetings and creating tasks.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was a very cool product, we called it AG Virtual Assistant and it took a lot of effort for us to integrate and to make it working.

[SPEAKER_00]: but then a touchy PT revolution came and it came so commodity in parts of the teams and resume and every any meeting platform as it integrated.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we had to trash it the way sadly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also in the flow of the

[SPEAKER_00]: current product it pivoted a few times so we started with the AI suite that's the on-prem and then I had several conversations with tech leaders so I made for example checkpoint and other companies and I realized that they're looking for more of an infrastructure not the solution itself.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's how the firewall was born.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a conversation I had with a few tech leaders that gave me the direction of the need.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is how it evolved.

[SPEAKER_00]: And like I'm very heavily involved with customer integration interaction.

[SPEAKER_00]: I like to do all of these meetings myself.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think my main role in the company is like product management.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's like area which I also mostly like to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm very customer-led.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I hear what customers want.

[SPEAKER_00]: I try to build some prototype to show it to them, working very short iterations even if it's not fully functional.

[SPEAKER_00]: Get short feedbacks and bring it to market as fast as possible.

[SPEAKER_00]: Today, with the eye, the cycles are short and dramatically.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's so easy today to build a prototype without even knowing to code, which is really astonishing.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's very easy to bring something to someone to see.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so you've got that MVP build that first piece of the platform and you're iterating quickly, I hear that and you decided to pull that first part of the platform, but at some point, you're getting the traction that you want or you're heading the direction you want.

[SPEAKER_01]: How did you go about maturing and progressing the entire platform and I think, you know, it's going to be interesting to hear based on how many problems you're solving, how you build your roadmap, how you decide what is the next most important thing to build.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a mixture of what I like to do things I enjoy, that are challenging, innovative.

[SPEAKER_00]: For example, right now we're strongly looking into the new chain of Guardian Agent, AI agents.

[SPEAKER_00]: These are Agent.

[SPEAKER_00]: That control other agent that they don't mess up the system or don't do things that are insecure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Both me and my partner are very technical oriented, but let's say when the iPhone came into the market and no one really knew what it is about, we were among the first people that developed an app.

[SPEAKER_00]: We by the way developed an offline navigation app that was the first top of the market place in Israel back then.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we're very driven into technology.

[SPEAKER_00]: Typically, it hits good with the markets, like market like some innovative solutions, and we obviously not do it just for the fun, like we do it after we speak to customers and understand the needs.

[SPEAKER_00]: Don't think I have any special answer here to give more than the logic sense that we speak to customers, understand the needs and develop appropriately.

[SPEAKER_01]: So then I'm curious about team, how'd you build your team?

[SPEAKER_01]: What do you look for in those people to indicate that they are the winning horses to join you?

[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, I'm very proud of my team.

[SPEAKER_00]: Most of my core developers are with me five to ten years.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's very not obvious here in the height of the ecosystem in Israel, where we have surrounded by the big giants, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, whoever, and I'm proud that my employees stick with me and I take it as an honor.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when I try to look for an employee,

[SPEAKER_00]: The 4-H stands for Humble, the Honest, Hungry and Happy, and this is what I look for, and when I see someone that fits Ticks all the 4 categories, I feel it's a match, and it takes me time to find employees and very...

[SPEAKER_00]: easy about that, but it's like a day, you need to keep trying and till you feel it, like I feel now with 30 years of experience, I'm pretty experienced, I can feel when it's a good fit, I can also say I'm also following to other concepts that if you're not sure it's not, but if you have even a small doubt, it's not, and sometimes sadly we need to say good why, if it's not a match and also here I have a rule, it's very hard to say good

[SPEAKER_00]: But I always ask myself, what would happen, how sad will I be if you'll come to me and say I don't want to work anymore?

[SPEAKER_00]: If I feel the answer is, I won't be too sad, it's probably not the right employee from.

[SPEAKER_00]: So these are like, I shared with you, I think, three different principles, like, how to hire, when to say goodbye, I'm happy to be like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: This will be interesting how you approach this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious about scalability, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And that could be technology.

[SPEAKER_01]: It could be people and both are applicable here.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious about how you approach that in the beginning.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if there have been interesting areas where you've had to fight it as you've crowned.

[SPEAKER_00]: In our previous line of business, we had a lot of challenges.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the application firewall.

[SPEAKER_00]: This application firewall was very challenging for two reasons.

[SPEAKER_00]: One, we intercepted the other vendors' application.

[SPEAKER_00]: Namely, Microsoft Teams WebEx Skype, so we injected all sorts of scripts, but I was to get visibility water and employees using.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the traffic did not go over HTTP, like VOSO audio, so it was very technical in challenging.

[SPEAKER_00]: And many times, not many times, but quite a few times, the vendor namely Microsoft or whatever changed the technology or did modification that suddenly broke our product.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some cases it looked like it didn't for a minute, because they're not happy.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've other vendors intercepting their functionalities.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can say, these are events in which I clearly remember, like suddenly all of your business looks like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you won't solve it, you don't have validity.

[SPEAKER_00]: The other problem with the application firewall line of business, it was very mission critical.

[SPEAKER_00]: Once our product did not work,

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you don't have any communication, you immediately get a phone call from the CEO of that company.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like very mission critical.

[SPEAKER_00]: These years of the type of product we're challenging, I can say.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what I like with the AI, so it's very needed.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not something I try not to rely on other vendors, like we are independent solution, an independent layer intercepting in between, and this is a much more comfort zone for us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also, it's not machine-critical, it's important to AI, but the business won't fall to the ground if two minutes something won't work.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, as you step out on a balcony, you look across how that you've built thus far.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm most proud of the team, I'm very proud of the team.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very proud that we have a small company we managed to achieve 25 Fortune 500, so people don't see it to straight-forward for a company our size, like we're around 25 employees.

[SPEAKER_00]: These are things like, I walk home and I know I have 25 people that support their families with my salary.

[SPEAKER_00]: We will bootstrap 12 years.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not straightforward to be a bootstrap company.

[SPEAKER_00]: You need to be very calculated on what expensive what you spend the money on.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's something I'm proud of.

[SPEAKER_00]: The company I built with my own hands for nothing, step by step without any external finance help.

[SPEAKER_00]: I must say that recently we changed a little bit the philosophy and we incorporated the private investor in the last six or nine months before and because we felt we need now to move fast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Today I market is so rapidly evolving.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can't do it step by step like we used to do in the past.

[SPEAKER_00]: We feel like we're in the right place, we've the right team, the right knowledge, the right technology, and we want to hit the market fast to be leaders in our market, which is securing AI.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think we're very fast.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that something we need to improve and many times it becomes on the expense of quality.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if I'm honest with myself, our first customer's typically suffer for the like us eventually, but the beginning of the journey typically is painful in many cases.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a big journey between having a product working in your lab and really being working in production.

[SPEAKER_00]: And many times it happened sadly that we did an update and all sorts of things broke.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have something specific, but I think that's an area we should improve because we are

[SPEAKER_00]: Very excited always to go fast and I typically very much like as soon as possible to get customer feedback, sometimes there's a balance between working fast and working high quality.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's something we need to improve and consider in some scenario.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it happened more than once in the past that

[SPEAKER_00]: No, we did updates and sort of things broke, retired regrett of.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like anything specific in mind right now, but that's something I think was painful more than once.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's look forward, then, you know, what does the future look like?

[SPEAKER_01]: For Progotics, the product, for A-Gat, for all the things, I know you're excited about all of the changes with AI and the industry and the advancement.

[SPEAKER_01]: Tell me what the future looks like.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think what's unique about our offerings that our companies focus on security side, the company focusing on AI services, we bring the combination, I think it's a unique approach and I'd like us to be a second name for companies that are looking for security eye, but whether they want the AI.

[SPEAKER_00]: as a service, but secure or they want to secure other AI services we want to be there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now, as you probably know and hear a lot, curing AI agents is the next step and we bring here, I think, and we are not the only one in the market for sure, but I think we bring a nice approach covering all sorts of layers because we have this proxy for many years that we're developing with our application firewall before.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very robust process that gives us good visibility of everything employees are doing in the browser, but not only on your development environment, on your machines, if all anything so everything is visible, I want to take the company to the direction more of a leader in the agente AI security.

[SPEAKER_01]: Let's wish you a UFO who influences the way that you work.

[SPEAKER_01]: A man or many persons are something you look up to and why.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have my partner, there's a serial, I don't remember the inspection time, but five hats.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's different characteristics that you have in the company.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I am wearing it's called the yellow hat, which is, I think it was yellow, the color.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's more initiative, positive thinking, fasting, a lot of ideas, and my partner is more the conservative, money-wise contracts, all of these.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a balance, I'm happy to work with him and he's certainly being inspiring for me.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the investor, which I feel he prefers to be anonymous, because he's a private person.

[SPEAKER_00]: But for me, he's a big inspiration.

[SPEAKER_00]: I suddenly, when he came to my company and he's so much believed in us.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's something I never felt in the past, someone so much believing in you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he did very significant things in the past, like he went through two very big business exits in the past nine digit deals.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he always tells me since we met, which is only a year ago, something like this.

[SPEAKER_00]: He always tells me to think big, think big, work big, you'll become big.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think for me is a very inspiring personality.

[SPEAKER_00]: without the technicality exactly what to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the way you think, you know, he pushed me to engage with guard there and get consultancy from below it and hire a PR agency and things that I never thought in the past to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're always very modest and careful.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he like pushes me and I see his achievement and it gives me confidence to do it the same.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I try to adapt from him the concept, think big you'll become big.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we're trying to do with the change now that we have an investment and have more freedom with expenses.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm excited with this.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're going now to events which we never did with these things that we never did before.

[SPEAKER_01]: Last question you have, so you get on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're jazzed about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: They can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait show it off to you right there on the plane.

[SPEAKER_01]: What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?

[SPEAKER_00]: What I just said now is that I'd advise I would love to share back with

[SPEAKER_00]: If you think big, you'll become big.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you believe you need to believe in yourself, and it will affect your surrounding.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I think.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you think positive, things will be positive.

[SPEAKER_00]: I truly believe without any relation to reverse a tech, a youngster, or any other opportunity opportunist, I strongly believe that thoughts become reality.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you really believe in what you do and you can envision your future bright and clear and envision yourself becoming a leader and what you do, it will happen eventually.

[SPEAKER_00]: It will find the way to become reality.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's not advice, just believing yourself strongly and things will happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like when you cycle, for example, also when you surf by the way, you need to look ahead.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very big tip by keeping me having me taking when I'm surfing.

[SPEAKER_00]: and it's a very long concept that you need to look to that direction where you want to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also when you go down here and cycling instead of looking down you need to go looked ahead.

[SPEAKER_00]: And also in business in life, if you have a clear direction in front of you,

[SPEAKER_00]: you'll reach there.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's also why I like all of my employees every morning.

[SPEAKER_00]: They send me like a daily sprint.

[SPEAKER_00]: What they want to do is not about micromanagement.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's about when you have a plan, then it becomes reality.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't have any plan typically you'll get lost.

[SPEAKER_01]: All those fantastic advice.

[SPEAKER_01]: We are thank you for being on the show today.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for telling the creation story of Progotics, a product of A-Gat.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you all for your time.

[SPEAKER_01]: and this concludes another chapter of Code Story.

[SPEAKER_01]: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhardt.

[SPEAKER_01]: Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or the podcasting app at your choice.

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[SPEAKER_01]: And thanks again for listening.