When your product fundamentally changes how enterprises think about security, traditional go-to-market playbooks go out the window. Anjuna, which has grown 4x year over year and closed deals with major banks in record time, offers valuable lessons for deep tech founders navigating category creation.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Ayal Yogev shared key insights from their journey of bringing confidential computing to the enterprise market.
1. Find Your Real Category (It Might Not Be What You Think)
Despite Ayal’s extensive security background, one of their biggest breakthroughs came from realizing they were in the wrong category entirely. “Interestingly enough, I grew up in security, so I thought about us sort of as a security solution,” Ayal reveals, “but the way the customers are looking at us is not as a security solution, but more as an infrastructure solution.”
This insight fundamentally changed their go-to-market approach: “We end up talking to the CIO or the infrastructure team and not necessarily to the security team.”
2. Turn Budget Line Absence into an Advantage
Unlike companies competing in established categories, Anjuna faces a unique challenge: “Usually we walk in and there’s no budget allocated for confidential computing.” But rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, they’ve turned it into an opportunity for higher-level conversations.
“We’ve gotten to board level visibility just because of what this enables you to do,” Ayal explains. “This is not just a security solution that allows you to reduce the risk a little bit. This essentially enables you to do things that you just couldn’t before.”
3. Leverage Industry Giant Tailwinds
Instead of fighting the market education battle alone, Anjuna benefits from major players’ investments in the space. “We’re getting a lot of tailwinds from the public cloud and from the CPU vendors that are doing this,” Ayal notes. “When Microsoft is talking about this and Amazon is talking about this and Google, you know, Google Cloud is talking about this and intel and AMD and Nvidia, it all essentially helps us because customers are looking for way to leverage this.”
4. Time Your Analyst Relationships
With any new category, analyst relationships require careful timing. “There’s sort of a chicken and egg type of a thing,” Ayal explains, “because they’re not gonna talk to you or take you seriously until they hear enough about it from customers. But then there’s some customers who are not going to buy or talk to you unless they hear about it from Gartner and Forrester.”
The solution? “You kind of have to do it in the right way and the right time. If you kind of go with an idea and like a very early product with no customers to Gardner and Forrester, they’re not going to be that helpful to you.”
5. Follow Proven Category Creation Models
Rather than inventing everything from scratch, Anjuna found success in following VMware’s category creation playbook. “We’re essentially following VMware footsteps to some extent,” Ayal shares. Just as VMware made virtualization accessible without requiring applications to be rewritten, Anjuna is doing the same for confidential computing.
The results speak for themselves: “We’re growing extremely fast. We’re about to quadrupling every year now,” Ayal reveals. Even more impressively, they’re “closed deals with very large banks within a six month cycle, which is extremely fast compared to how these banks tend to move.”
The Bigger Picture
These lessons point to a broader truth about enterprise go-to-market strategy: sometimes the biggest opportunity lies not in fitting into existing categories, but in helping customers think differently about their problems. As Ayal notes, it’s about enabling customers to “do things that you just couldn’t before.”
For founders building category-creating products, success might depend less on traditional GTM metrics and more on your ability to shift how enterprises think about and solve their fundamental challenges.
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