The following interview is a conversation we had with Dave Mor, CEO and Co-Founder of OneLayer, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15 Million Raised to Protect Private Cellular Networks

Dave Mor
Thank you, Brett, for hosting me. Appreciate that.

Brett
No problem. Super excited to chat with you. So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and maybe a bit more about your background?

Dave Mor
Yes, thank you. I serve a bit more than 15 years at the israeli military intelligence force in several positions both on cyber domain and seller domain. After that, I was chief innovative technology in a company that we develop new cutting edge capabilities for the production line. Now, every time we brought a top notch technology, state of the art, many algorithms, really cutting edge. And connectivity was the main issue. So it was clear to me then when we would establish our own company, we are going to focus to find a strong trend that really solves the connectivity issue in the industry full domain. That’s how we got to the private.

Brett
Five g. Now, I’m sure you learned a lot from your time in the israeli military intelligence, but if we had to choose one big takeaway, what would that takeaway be? 

Dave Mor
So as ex special units in the operation, in many cases, there are many obstacles that at the beginning looks too hard to overcome. But once you allocate the right attention to details, once you’re breaking down, really, the challenge and the gaps and the barriers, once you’re bringing the best guy to your team, everything is impossible. 

Brett
I love that. And I’m a huge fan of the israeli tech ecosystem. A few years back, I read the book startup nation, and I literally booked a flight and flew to Tel Aviv a few days or a few weeks after reading that book, just because I wanted to understand it. And the numbers were just staggering back then, and I’m sure they’re even better. But so much technology comes out of Israel, it’s truly astonishing, especially in cybersecurity. It seems like 50% of cybersecurity startups in the venture world come out of Israel, which I just find amazing.

Dave Mor
Yeah, I believe that of course we have a very strong ecosystem and of course there is a lot of experience for that in the domain. But on top of that, one of the things you’re really learning during your army time is to look on challenge as an opportunity. Even though it might look complicated, there is a drivers how to overcome that. 

Brett
Something another guest said was that people in the israeli tech ecosystem and because they come from this military background, they’re really thought to be fearless when it comes to tackling the biggest problems and going after the biggest competitors. And the example they were talking about there I think was Monday. Monday.com is a big idea. It’s going after this big massive market. And their theory was because of their time in the israeli military that they were able to really just build this mindset that anything is possible. You can go after these big problems and you can win against these giants. 

Dave Mor
Yeah, I believe there is few things that during the army time you have been asked on a lot of cases that as a retrospective looks ods for putting that on a 20 years old guy and the army give you the opportunity to really handle things that matters and change lives later on when as part of that, as part of the process, some of the methodology is that let’s see, when the obstacle we come, we will find a way how to overcome it. Because at the end of the day, of course it’s army, you have a lot of resources when the time is really matter. And it’s great, even naive that everything is possible.

Brett
It’s amazing. Let’s switch gears here and let’s dive deeper into OneLayer and everything that you’re doing there. So at a very high level, can you explain the problem that OneLayer solves?

Dave Mor
Sure. So until 2000 ISh organization had only one type of enterprise network which we call all it. But then it split it to critical environment and regular it. And that’s been called as OT operational technology. Few years later, around 2010, a remote computing start to evolve. What we all know about the cloud today and in 2020 a new technology erupt which is the private 5g. It’s an enterprise network running on your own cellular network. And today there is a capability to have as a corporate, your own private cellular which provide you the ability to connect devices like we always have with our smartphones that enable you to have a great recovery, a very reliable connectivity, high bandwidth to connect all your IoT devices. So it’s really a wireless IoT network running on a different protocol.

Brett
What types of companies have a private cellular network. 

Dave Mor
So today it’s growing so fast you can say every company just respect itself. You’re taking the utilities of the world, you’re taking the manufacturing of the world like John Deere or Airbus or know, any corporate really has a lot of devices. It can be ports, it can be airports, you see stadiums, you see cases of NFL, NBA and many more. Every case that you have a huge environment that required connectivity or you have moving devices, it can be agv, robotics, drones, wearables. Telola is the most robust technology to connect devices. 

Brett
And take me back to the early days. What was it about this problem specifically that made you say, yes, that’s it. I want to build a company around that. Because I’m sure coming from your background you probably saw a lot of cybersecurity problems that could be solved. What was it about this problem that attracted you to it? 

Dave Mor
So you know dad, it’s a good question. Because if you are looking about the ex military guys, you have actually here several units. And there are guys that come in for one of the units that looking for the most red ocean and are sure that they can build the best product. And there are guys that coming from a different unit, they’re looking for the most blue ocean that can have a huge challenge to overcome. And if you are looking on the wonderful companies grow out of Israel, it’s really easy to distinguish between the two companies founders based on this origin. Now I try to be in the middle. I look for a new technology that is growing very fast. There is no engineering barriers for the technology to explode. But it hasn’t been touched enough yet, haven’t been solved the pain yet.

Dave Mor
And there is a very clear pain here. So it’s an enterprise domain. So it’s a very clear cut go to market. It’s an enterprise need. And there are great cybersecurity companies that already defined what the enterprise need in the IoT domain. But it’s sterile technology, which is very different than IP. So after screening around four to five months, different technologies, different panes, different verticals, we got to this cross section. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense and super interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about fraction. So obviously you’re a private company, so I’m sure you’re not going to share all numbers. But are there any metrics that you can share or numbers that you can share that demonstrate the growth that you’re seeing today?

Dave Mor
Yeah, so let’s say that just we are of course an early stage. We are less than a year and a half. But I think that at least in the last year, in all part of the funnel, we have a challenge of over demand. So we are working very hard to enhance the team and to grow the team to support all of that. It’s of course long sales cycles, but the conversion and the real pain once you’re speaking with the relevant stakeholder is amazing because the domain is so defined, because IoT problems in enterprise domain is very clear, and because there is no good technologies that really designed for the private cellular because it’s a new domain. All the solution from the IP domain I’m not really able to convert to the private g. 

Dave Mor
So we’re receiving a lot of traction and we are working very hard to really deliver the demand we are having here. Now, in term of capabilities here, we are already deployed in multiple geographies in a very large scale of networks and in cases that are a bit more on prem and cases that are a bit more cloud environment. And you really can see that the growing amount of device is amazing. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. What do you attribute to this growth and this success? Obviously, every Founder listening in wants to be able to say that there’s that much demand. But what do you think you and the team have really gotten right? 

Dave Mor
So I believe that when we map, it’s a few things. First, we map what is the process to having this private five g. And you see that in a lot of cases, security taken as an afterthought at the beginning of the pilot stage. And then the it team want to connect this amazing network to the rest of the organization network and the CISO or other security teams say, stop, you cannot connect that to my network. Where is the security stack? Where is my visibility? Where is my segmentation? Where is my anomaly detection? I have a well defined compliance. I have a well defined stack. How can you do that? So when we establish the company, we work very hard not to invent the wheel. We work very hard to say, okay, what is the enterprise problem? 

Dave Mor
Let’s ignore it’s a cellular how enterprise protects the IoT today, how the stack is built. Now let’s take that and try to install it as is in the private cellular and let’s see the gap and let’s measure the time and the cost and the complexity to convert existing solution for this new domain. And we map the gaps and we crystallize three main gaps that almost required to reestablish the entire product and no one building product from scratch unless it’s a new company. Usually companies adjust existing products and we saw this is almost impossible in this domain. So really to enable in a new domain to simplify the language because we don’t want the cybersecurity team to be a cellular experts. They already have the methodology, nothing different here. 

Dave Mor
It doesn’t matter that the back end of the product is cellular and we want to simplify the day to day. So we are doing a lot of integration. So if their solution is already working, if they put the policy, if they have the visibility tools on the it side, we integrate with those tools and translate that to the cellular language. So beside being a standalone product for the cellular domain, we’re doing a lot of integration to really simplify the day to day. Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if it’s a wireless wifi camera, cellular camera or cable camera. The security team needs the same capabilities, the same visibility, the same segmentation. Now the last part which really moves the needle is the ability to really create here an ROI model. 

Dave Mor
Because the migration to this domain, taking the devices to this domain and adding more and more use cases is really a manual process today because our security platform enable you to have a lot of capabilities. We also enable a lot of automation to onboard a new use case with the right compliance, with the right security procedures, with the right onboarding which really have provide us abilities to work with several stakeholders. There is a security that’s receiving their security stack. We have the it that we simplify their life. We have the digital and innovation team that have the eager to push this domain forward and we have the economic buyer that really sees the value in the cost reduction once the product is being deployed.

Brett
Interesting. Now as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised about $15 million so far. What have you learned about fundraising? 

Dave Mor
So I think that at the end of the day and that’s how we build the fundraising, there is no one type of investor and when you are raising money you really need to understand which type of investors are the most suitable for you. Taking investor of a deep tech, they are looking for technologies that really shake the world and really disrupt taking corporate vcs. They are looking for different type of metrics. Taking classic cyber investors, their traction is much for the radio chain, quick product market fit, easy, ramp up. So when you are understanding your domain, will it enable you to navigate which investor will be the most suitable for you? I think that’s topic number one. 

Dave Mor
Topic number two, a lot of founders that I meet see in my ecosystem and also ask questions the past, try to highlight the upside, the positive side and ignore or reduce the downside of the risks and try to do the opposite. Of course you need to show you have a plan how to be a great hypergold company. But no one is stupid. And if investors really see that allocating attention to your gaps and this is your mitigation plan, this is how you are not ignoring the risks, you are not ignoring the gaps, you are looking them straightforward. You are taking the risk, you are measuring the risk, your ability to frame the risk size and you have a mitigation plan. So you are building a much more balanced company and not just have a great dream of a pink future. 

Brett
Now let’s imagine you were starting the company again today from scratch. If you were doing that, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself? 

Dave Mor
Wow, that’s a tough question. I think that as a retrospective and that’s what we learn. As much as we receive more data we can move faster. So I would allocate much more attention of capabilities to open more doors, to have more dialogues, to learn more and having more capabilities of top of the funnel versus the bottom of the funnel. 

Brett
Final question for you here. So let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s that big picture vision that you’re building? 

Dave Mor
So as 5G private five G is a hyperpost domain, we here to establish the end to end stack for this domain in term of security and asset management. So based on how things is growing today and assuming this is not going to slow down just to be even faster, wonder is going to be a very dominant company in the IoT cybersecurity domain. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, I love the problem that you’re solving and I love how you’re approaching solving the problem. We are up on time so we’ll have to wrap here if any founders listening in want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision. Where should they go?

Dave Mor
LinkedIn is my best platform. That’s probably the best area. 

Brett
Awesome. Dave, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Category Visionaries, talking through what you’re building and sharing some of these valuable lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate you taking the time. 

Dave Mor
Thank you, Brett, for having me today. 

Brett
No problem. Keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.