Perception Point Acquires Web Security Startup Hysolate

‘Once we were introduced to the opportunity, we had no hesitation because of the quality of the technology, the experience of the team, and the product that they built,’ says Perception Point CEO Yoram Salinger.

Perception Point has purchased Hysolate to make browsing the internet a more secure experience for organizations and their employees.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based content security vendor said its acquisition of Tel Aviv-based Hysolate will allow Perception Point to expand beyond safeguarding email, cloud storage and cloud applications and make the endpoint more secure for customers. Roughly 25 Hysolate employees are joining Perception Point, with founder and Chief Technology Officer Tal Zamir becoming CTO of the combined organization.

“Once we were introduced to the opportunity, we had no hesitation because of the quality of the technology, the experience of the team, and the product that they built, which is extremely innovative,” Perception Point CEO Yoram Salinger (pictured above) told CRN. Terms of the acquisition, which closed this week, aren’t being disclosed.

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Integrating Perception Point’s detection, containment, and remediation offerings with Hysolate’s web isolation capabilities will make it possible to identify malicious artifacts or acts earlier in the lifecycle, Salinger said. He praised Hysolate’s evolution since its founding in 2016 from browser isolation to workspace protection to a full-fledged web security vendor.

Hysolate sets itself apart from other web security tools that perform browsing at a remote site in the cloud by delivering a latency-free user experience as well as protection against phishing attempts, Salinger said. And unlike emerging vendors who are building their own secure web browsers, Hysolate provides full isolation on a native Chrome or Edge browser, meaning there’s no user experience change.

Salinger expects to integrate Hysolate’s web security and Perception Point’s detection capabilities together over the next three months and release both full browser and browser extension versions of the tool by mid-2022. The full browser experience is intended for larger enterprises looking to enforce corporate policies and ensures users can’t download items from the internet into a secure environment.

The browser extension, meanwhile, provides isolation capabilities, but doesn’t enforce existing company policies in a web environment, according to Salinger. Hysolate by Perception Point will be priced on a per user, per month basis, and will be sold alongside Perception Point’s email security offering as well as its OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint security capabilities, Salinger said.

Hysolate’s technology is well-suited for MSPs and their SMB clients since it requires close to no effort to implement and deploy, doesn’t change the user experience, and customers likely won’t even know the technology is operating on their web browser. Roughly 60 percent of Perception Point’s sales go through MSPs today, and Hysolate will leverage Perception Point’s channel since Hysolate primarily goes direct.

The topline revenue contribution from Hysolate will be somewhat limited in 2022, but Salinger expects the deal will contribute significantly to annual recurring revenue over time by dramatically expanding Perception Point’s total addressable market. Outside of annual recurring revenue, he said Perception Point will track total contract value and conversion of proofs of concept into placed orders for Hysolate.

“The combination of the two [Perception Point and Hysolate] brings way more value than it seems on the surface of it,” Salinger said. “And I believe that this this gives us a huge opportunity in the market.”

Montreal-based VARS has been bundling Perception Point’s phishing protection and spam technology with incident response and other services over the past three years as part of a fully managed offering, according to Chief Operating Officer Maxime Boutin. Clients have been very satisfied with Perception Point’s product during that time since it does exactly what it is supposed to do, Boutin said.

VARS can provision Perception Point’s technology automatically without having to talk with anyone at the company, and proof of concepts (POCs) and product deployment are fully self-service, Boutin said. He praised Perception Point for adding features such as account takeover and ingestion of Office 365 logs that aren’t directly related to email scanning but still improve the security of email environments.

“It’s really the type of partnership that a MSSP is looking for,” Boutin said. “You have the ‘ear to the ground’ mentality, plus they’re responsive and innovative.”