“We need to brace ourselves for the challenges posed by more machines communicating with one another. We should be ready to counter these challenges with solutions to process increasing amounts of data, based on deep learning techniques.” Mark Gazit, ThetaRay CEO

“We are transforming the way that the world deals with data.”

ThetaRay is a leading provider of big data analytics, providing robust cyber security measures for banks, manufacturers and enterprise clients. CEO Mark Gazit walks us through the story of the company – from its inception until today. 

Foundation for success

ThetaRay was founded in 2013 by world renowned mathematicians Prof Amir Averbuch (Tel Aviv University) and Prof Ronald Coifman (Yale), with a mission to change the way that the world deals with data. The company is the result of over 15 years of academic research.

The founders developed algorithms which can process infinite amounts of data, highlighting anything anomalous. I was brought on board as CEO in 2013 to drive the business to success, and together with our all star team we have built an organization with offices in Israel, NY, London and Singapore. I have been working in cyber security since the early days, helping to prepare financial institutions and governments for advanced cyber threats. Knowing that ThetaRay has the ability to help companies collect data and uncover the hidden ‘needle in the needlestack’ inspires me every day.

We provide unsupervised analytics for any organization with vast amounts of big data – helping them to learn from their data without human intervention. We’re growing at a steady rate and this directly correlates with the increasing need in the market – organizations are only generating more data every day and this is the main driver of our growth as a solutions provider.

From one win to the next

Our first customer was General Electric (GE). They trialed our solution by providing us with millions of lines of data with hundreds of parameters. We didn’t know where the data came from but within a few minutes we had identified a specific number of entries which were anomalous. Subsequent to further investigation, GE verified that we had – in a matter of minutes – identified the critical few lines among millions of lines of data. 

We won an award from GE for being the most innovative company in the industrial internet arena. Our solution was successfully integrated onto GE’s Predix platform, and our first customer also went on to become another ThetaRay investor!

We’ve also worked very closely with CitiBank and graduated their accelerator program in Tel Aviv.

We built a platform around our data agnostic technology and created solutions for banks to fight money laundering, terrorist funding, fraud and ATM security breaches. We have seen enormous traction in the financial services industry, with major international banks leveraging our solutions to protect themselves from risk.

Valuable lessons from the market

We listen carefully to market trends and we are proactive in creating solutions for our customers. We are market driven; we listen to customer demand.

• Our success can be accredited to five main factors:
• Our people – we have an amazing group of professionals who work hard and work together
• Our secret sauce – the set of proprietary algorithms
• Our ability to constantly innovate. We have much more intellectual property than we ever thought we’d be able to produce.
• The ability to execute successfully on behalf of our customers
• Our partners – this includes our investors and also our customers who we consider as both customers and partners

In today’s age of connected devices, when everything is online and machines are speaking with machines, the IT department must adapt as well. There is no way that humans alone can analyze the enormous amounts of data that all this activity is generating. Our algorithms enable machines to handle it instead - in real time, with very high precision and minimal false alarms.

What the future holds

Machines produce lots of data, and we are moving into the age of the Industrial Internet of Things. We need to brace ourselves for more machines communicating with one another – for example autonomous cars – and we have to counter to the challenges that these new technologies pose, with unsupervised methods of analysis to process the increasing amounts of data.

We are constantly innovating and developing market leading solutions for a variety of organizations. We have a robust pipeline as we develop solutions to deal both with increasingly sophisticated types of financial crimes, as well as in the new arena of cyber protection for critical manufacturers.

In the years to come we will continue to gain market share, serving many verticals including critical manufacturing, financial institutions, energy suppliers, aviation companies and we envision our solutions being installed in almost every large enterprise to help them deal with ever increasing amounts of data.

In the driver’s seat

Mark Gazit is a prominent senior executive with 20 years of experience in Israeli and international high-tech companies. Mark served as Managing Director of Nice Track, which provides software and hardware solutions to government agencies worldwide in the areas of information intelligence and cyber. He was also the Group President & CEO of SkyVision, which he took from the start-up stage to a $100M company serving over 50 countries worldwide. Mark has held additional pivotal roles in leading companies.