 Okay, welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of RSA Covers 2023. Day four, I'm your host, John Furrier. Dave Vellante left the building, he's flying back to Boston, and we're going to wrap things up. Last couple of interviews, we're going to get all the stories. We're going to go to the very end. Got a great story here with Dan Amiga's co-founder, CTO of Island. The Enterprise browser is their product. It's a very compelling story. It thinks things differently, but provides an amazing, simple interface that we all know, the browser. Thank you, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. So we were just talking, we can't stop talking about this, we'll have the cameras are on. Let's get into it. The island company that you founded, you've done multiple startups. It's called the Enterprise Browser. What is it? Why did you build it? Sure. So I founded the company with Mike Faye. Mike used to run Symantec, and the CEO of McAfee in the past, and we got to know each other when he acquired my company in 2017. And we thought about, we always thought about Enterprise browsers as in, you know, the browser today is the main tool. It is the operating system. And I like to ask people if you have to choose between your operating system with no browser, or a browser, what would you go for, right? And we just figured out how the opportunity is huge. If you build a browser, looks and behaves exactly like Chrome or Edge, et cetera, but has all of the enterprise and IT and even productivity controls and tools for the enterprise, right? And it turns out you can do it if you're basing it on Chromium, the open source project behind all the modern browsers. We started two and a half years ago, you know, amazing traction, hundreds of customers, pretty much every vertical, financial, healthcare, industrial, retail, but also, since we're based in San Francisco, so one of the things that excites me most is the tech adoption. So we have lots of big tech companies, no perimeter, only identity, using the enterprise browser, over a million endpoints today. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of the Brave browser when that came out, it's like, hey, that makes a lot of sense. That's everything built in for the consumer, you know, no malware, it's got some shielding for cookies, but it wasn't really an enterprise-grade browser. You're saying you did a similar approach, built the browser from scratch, using the open source chromium? Yeah, I remember a few years ago, you used to see Brave everywhere, it's a great product, it's a living proof that there is room for purpose-built browsers. So Brave is a privacy-built browser, right? What we've done is we've built a browser that's built in for the enterprise, has a lot of privacy controls as well, and what we've seen is, and we like to call it enterprise, and not a secure browser. It has a lot of security controls, like your anti-malm. They have different needs. Correct. The workflows behind it, a lot of legacy apps. So we do invest a lot in legacy and workflow, privacy, security, but yeah, purposely built browser for the enterprise is a great thing. Well, I think it's an interface. I mean, I'd love to have a cube browser for all of our users, media browser, but it's an interface, this is kind of a clever thing. So I can think of five reasons why I like it already. One, if you think about the workflows of old IT, I mean, this show here is transforming from old security to new security. You're hearing about platforms. Platforms are inherently a great thing, but a browser's a front end to probably back end cloud. I'm sure I'll get more questions on how your back end works, but as a user, I go to work. I'm a big financial services company. I'm sure they got some certified apps, Bloomberg subscription. They got databases. They got VDI or some sort of virtual desk that they want everything locked down. So I'll tell you about what I consider to be new security. New security. Go ahead. So let's go back 10 years ago, right? And you see a lot of the vendors today who've built tools for 10 years ago, and those tools are about shackling the user. They don't care about making the connection slower, the experience bumpy, et cetera. They don't care about, so new security for me is about faster work, easier to work with, right? And that's what the Enterprise browser is all about. When you build those tools directly, and I'll tell you what the aha moment we've been talking about your nephew earlier, right? And how he complains working at a financial, now things are slow, right? That's the aha moment. If when you use the browser, things are faster. You can actually remove a lot of the intermediates and the speed bumps. And you talked about the Q browser for you guys. So what we do is we also have what we call Enterprise branding. So it doesn't have to be the Island browser. It can be the browser for the financial, the browser for the medical health care. And it makes the experience so much better for the frontline workers. Let me ask you a question. I mean, the first thing the sketch would say is, okay, what about compatibility? Some things don't work well with browsers. I even see Safari doesn't work well on some apps. What's the, what's the? Yeah, the world. The world is pretty much a standard-desized on Chromium as the de facto platform. So we support anything that works in Chrome or Edge, et cetera, which is 100% of the time. Is Edge Chromium based? Yeah, Edge is Chromium based. I did not know that. Edge is Chromium based since like three years ago. And so that pretty much covers 199% of the enterprise. There's legacy as well. There's your old ActiveX, Internet Explorer. We support that as well. So we baked in. That's got some security issues. You got to watch that. Yeah, so we baked it. Exactly. We baked in legacy IE stuff. And we do the controls for the ActiveX, the Flash, all of the stuff that was, is a good example for consumer versus enterprise. The consumer browsers took these out. We kept them only for your internal apps, for specific applications. You can put control. What are vulnerabilities? People would be like, okay, I get it, the browser. How do you ensure, give confidence that the security in the browser from an ActiveX or any kind of vulnerability that might be known or old? Oh my God. I like to call it the asymmetrical nature of the web. So think about, a user goes to Salesforce. Salesforce has hundreds of security engineers, right? But once you log in, the cookie is at the endpoint. The security is now at the endpoint responsibility, right? So what we did is, we built an entire security stack that protects all of the user data, the cookies, local storage. We have an anti-exploitation technology that takes all of these exploits away. We have anti-fishing technology. Make sure users are not typing their credentials where they shouldn't have. We even have security awareness built into the product. So you can teach users what links they should click and what links they couldn't, right? How about browser on support from Mac? Oh, we work with... So biometrics all plays well into it as well. Biometric is a big portion of what we do, we like to say we have a lot of passwordless abilities with biometrics. So it works across all the operating systems. Mac and Windows, Linux, et cetera. Yeah, take me through now. First of all, I love the product, love the vision. I love this purpose-built browser. I think that's a very clever and realistic vision. People want to have stuff customized. Back end, is there cloud behind it? What's behind it? What's the architecture? Or not, is there toolbar market? Is there plugins? What's the extensibility? Take us through kind of the holistic architecture of your business. Sure, so very simple, very simple architecture. We have a policy that's being downloaded from the cloud. So you go and configure your policy in the management console, but then the browsers will download the policy and would run it locally. From your cloud. Correct, correct. But at the end of the day, it's an endpoint application as a browser. The policy gets evaluated on the endpoint. Now, from an architectural perspective, the Chromium stack is very scalable. So you can build a lot of modules on top of that stack. So my team is growing up to be about 150 engineers. And think about them as separate companies. So we have a dedicated team working on DLP controls, a dedicated team working on productivity controls. From a customer perspective, they get all of these modules built in when they download the browser and use it. Super extensible, organizations can add more functionality, can keep using 100% of the extensions they use today. Like the Chrome extension. Like the Chrome extension. And all the apps that are supported, no one knows the difference. It's really on Mac OS or Windows. You literally cannot tell the difference. Got it. So it's like edge browser in a way. It would feel like Chrome or Edge. Correct. But with all the controls that enterprise want. Yeah, and if you think about what we've been doing in the industry in the past 15 or 20 years, we put all of those controls outside of the browser. So now when you bake it inside, it makes so much sense. Also from an architectural perspective, we leave pre-SSL. You don't have to terminate SSL. So the end user experience is just so much faster, so much better. Talk about the browser as it goes beyond the desktop to say mobile. You got web response, which I get that's probably going to be good. But what about native mobile apps? Sure. And iPad apps or over the top, set top TV apps? So we have built in support for mobile and users can go ahead and download our mobile app for their enterprise and use it. So that's a big thing for us. Lots of, a big requirement in the market. If you think about organizations, they need to enable BYOD, right? They don't want to manage these devices. Nobody wants to manage thousands and thousands of devices. And in the workforce, nobody wants to have his device managed, right? So we do have a browser-based distribution where we can launch these iPhone apps. We can connect directly to internal applications or SaaS applications, apply controls. But those devices don't have to be fully managed devices. You're the doorway to that enterprise. So you're looking at the enterprise app there. As far as the phone's concerned. As far as the phone's concerned. Okay, so let's get into the customers. What's the traction that you have right now? Take us through some of the business side of it. What's it like? I'll see, what's your reaction here on the floor? It's one of the big booths. You got a huge booth, congratulations. You must be swimming in some BC money, right? Customer money. It's doing well. It's no complain there. The company has raised more than $250 million. You know, it's our six or seven rodeo. So we were lucky to partner with some of the best investors in the world. Sequoia and Insight and the likes. It's a huge opportunity now in terms of traction. This is a new category. Yeah, totally agree. Custom built browser front end, tied into a backend cloud. Totally get it. So new category means there's no budget yet, right? New category means customers are skeptical, right? You got to educate them. Exactly. But guess what happens when they see it? They're like, this changes so much, so much type. It's such a big opportunity for consolidation. So we've been about a year and a quarter. So about five quarters in the market. Selling and delivering. Selling and delivering, you know. Fortune, 10 customers, Fortune 100 customers. Across every vertical. So there are lots of adoption, hundreds of customers. Customers are very excited about some of the big names in the world. But also since we're based in San Francisco, some of the best tech companies in the world are adopting this. And they're rolling it out across the companies. It's not like, are they rolling out like, because as a field, are they taking pilot approach? So, you know, they're adopting it. So you don't have to do an enterprise-wide enrollment on day one. So we have customers who've started with their BYOD or contract or use case. And then what we're seeing is we're seeing these great movement where they start with one use case. And like any platform, right? Oh, it's so easy. Let's apply this to more controls, right? By the way, they don't have to change the, you don't have, they don't have to tell the users, you guys should stop using Chrome or stop using Edge. Right? There's a dual modality. Yeah, they can do that. I mean, look, it's a bold, first of all, congratulations, bold move. Love the strategy, love the aggressiveness. Category creation is a big... Always fun. Always fun. It's go big or go home right there. And it sounds like you're looking good off the tee, as they say, in the VC world. Now, the question I would say is that, okay, if DevOps replaces DevSecOps replaces IT, normally this kind of old way was run by IT departments. Now, network and security teams are taking over that function and DevOps has taken over IT. Because developers are doing all the IT. Yeah. But classic IT of getting someone their machine, getting all their apps, putting the servers together. That's all done in the cloud now. It's a little bit easier, I should say, but someone would argue with that, but like it's just different. Absolutely. It's not a department, people just manual labor. Now it's gone away. You're another platform. Who's running this right now for you? Is it the DevOps teams? Is it the security teams? Is it the network teams? So it really depends on the company. We have customers where they spend about an hour a week to set it up and it would be that one security guy, usually companies about up to 5,000 employees. And then we have big digitalization projects. We've been working with a big business and it's going to change the way they access their apps. Hundreds of thousands of users, right? Then they have a bigger team, right? Usually the IT team or the desktop team would be running this, right? Well, what's the next goal for you? What's the next step? Get the funding, you're in market, you're going to amp it up, raise the awareness, get some beach head. What's the use case that gets you in the door, locks you in? Well, it's actually not a security use case. I'd say one of our main use cases is the VDI reduction. We call it the length of the wire. It's 2023, nobody wants to wait to get Pixar's streams from the cloud to go to Salesforce, right? So we see a lot of VDI reduction. Also, from just pure dollars perspective, a VDI session would be thousands of dollars a year for an average company. We take it down quite a bit, right? So that's the main use case. What's in it for us going forward? We're going to keep pushing. The opportunity is huge. You got a lot of engineers, 150 engineers, that's a good number. Yeah, yeah, we're going that up. Again, the opportunity is a big opportunity. You said you got SF and then you got Tel Aviv? Is that where the operations start? We're headquartered in Texas. Texas, okay. That's where Mike Fay, our CEO is, and my business partner. And then we have engineering and product based in Tel Aviv. Awesome, congrats. Well, we're going to get the cubes at Tel Aviv this year. Oh, happy to host you guys. We were going to be there in 2019, but the pandemic hit, we were making plans. There's so much demand for the cube in Tel Aviv. We're going to meet you to give us a little endorsement when we get down there. But yeah, great stuff. Congratulations on the island browser, island enterprise browser with island, purpose built, very bold, very visionary, very real. I think it's going to be the next big thing. The question is going to be, you got to get those engineers, make sure all the binaries are there. Get an execute. Making sure the developers can write code to it, create an ecosystem for it. And I think you're golden. Absolutely. We got to execute as I always like to say 2023, the product has to be perfect. Customers have to love it. But thank you for having me. Congratulations. Great conversation with Dan Amigo. It's the CTO co-founder of Island. They make the enterprise browser a revolutionary idea, new category creation, which is we know what that means. It's going to go big or go home. And we know looking good right now. So Dan, thanks for coming on us to cube coverage. We're already going big here. Day four, live coverage. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with more. Wrapping up the show after this short break.