The Tamnoon Playbook: Building Category-Defining Companies at the Intersection of MDR and CNAP

When you can’t find a category that fits your solution, build your own. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Tamnoon co-founder Marina Segal revealed how they stopped trying to squeeze into existing market segments and instead created something entirely new at the intersection of managed detection and response (MDR) and cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAP).

Finding the Gap Between Categories

“We are on the crossroads between the MDRs and CNAPs,” Marina explains. “I think we are merging two categories into one.” This wasn’t just clever positioning – it was born from recognizing that existing categories weren’t solving the full spectrum of customer problems.

While the cloud security industry has produced powerful detection tools, Marina identified a crucial gap: “This whole industry is just blooming. And then you have a lot of tools like we orcap, Prisma, cloud dominant security and others generating billions of dollars on products in cloud security space… the problem of detection and visibility is really now we can say that we know how to solve it.”

Building Beyond Detection

Instead of competing in the crowded detection space, Tamnoon focused on what happens next. “What Tamnoon is focused on is this next kind of logical step after the visibility and detection is solved, and this is the remediation and prevention,” Marina shares. This insight came from understanding the economic reality their customers faced: “it wouldn’t cost you to detect one more thing, but it may cost you a lot of money to remediate and prevent it if you are not solving it the right way.”

Breaking Industry Visual Conventions

Creating a new category meant breaking from industry conventions, starting with visual identity. “Cybersecurity these days is very crowded space and the industry is really evolving. And there are a lot of startups that even I’m sometimes looking at different startups and they all look blended to me,” Marina notes.

Their response? “For me, it was important to stand out. That’s why the green colors, that’s why we are very positive in our language.” This wasn’t just about aesthetics – it reflected their fundamental approach to the market.

Positioning as Partners, Not Vendors

Rather than positioning themselves as another tool vendor, Tamnoon took a different approach. “We are bringing managed services to the customers. We don’t believe that technology can be managed on its own. We still need humans to operate it,” Marina emphasizes.

This human-centric approach became core to their identity: “We are in the greens, we are solving problems. We are not adding any overhead on the companies. We are actually their trusted advisor.” By positioning themselves as an extension of their customers’ teams rather than another vendor, they created a unique value proposition that didn’t fit neatly into existing categories.

The Power of Early Customer Validation

Creating a new category required deep customer validation. Marina describes their initial phase: “First three months were very different from the second three months… really busy on customers, really busy with endless calls to validate and define the product roadmap, the company roadmap and make sure that we are moving into the right direction.”

This intensive customer development helped them understand not just what to build, but how to position it in a way that resonated with real needs rather than existing market categories.

Future Vision: Scaling Human Expertise

Their category creation strategy culminates in a clear vision for the future: “Our vision is very simple. We are the MDR for the CNAP space. We are building that remediation and prevention process that can scale the security experts and that is where we are headed.”

For B2B founders, Tamnoon’s approach to category creation offers valuable lessons. Instead of forcing their solution into existing categories or creating an artificial new one, they identified a genuine gap between established segments and built their entire company – from product to positioning to visual identity – around filling that gap.

Their success suggests that in crowded markets, the opportunity might not lie in building a better version of what exists, but in bridging the gaps between existing solutions. It’s a reminder that sometimes the best category isn’t one you find – it’s one you create by solving problems that cross traditional market boundaries.