The Gombach Pivot: When Creating a New Category is Better Than Fitting Into Existing Ones

Most security vendors are fighting for space in established market categories. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Gombach founder Ian Amit revealed why his company chose a different path: creating an entirely new category focused on cloud security remediation.

The Challenge of Category Definition

“We don’t necessarily have a defined market category,” Ian acknowledges. This isn’t a weakness – it’s a strategic choice. “If you try to look it up, the analyst firms wouldn’t have a good description and a good analysis of that space.”

Why Traditional Categories Weren’t Enough

The decision to create a new category came from a deep understanding of market frustrations. “There’s obviously great capabilities as far as the detection goes, but almost nothing when it comes to remediation,” Ian explains. The market was saturated with tools that could find problems, but few that could actually fix them.

The CISO Rebellion

This gap was creating a crisis for security leaders. “I do not want any more detection,” Ian quotes his peers saying. “This is becoming a liability for me to know more about the issues that I have in my environment. A hard enough time fixing the stuff that I do know about.”

Building a New Category

Instead of creating another detection tool, Gombach focused on automated remediation. “It’s essentially a solution that’s designed to provide contextual remediations, fixes at the code level that address configuration issues in your cloud deployment,” Ian explains.

The Market Response

The response from potential customers validated this approach. According to Ian, when speaking with CISOs and DevOps engineers, “they recognize this is a huge problem. It’s definitely something that needs to be solved. Sometimes they’re like, yeah, if that would have worked, this would have been amazing.”

Competitive Dynamics

Being first in a category comes with unique challenges. “There’s a couple of small players right now that, like Gombach and one or two of my competitors, they’re operating there and we’re surrounded by a lot of noise of companies that claim to do remediation enablement orchestration of remediation,” Ian notes.

The key difference? “No one really tries to solve the root of the problem and really alleviate the root cause. They’re all trying to, again, kind of orchestrate and basically automate a lot of the ticket jogging that we used to do.”

The Platform Vision

This category creation isn’t just about solving today’s problems – it’s about reshaping how organizations handle cloud infrastructure. Ian envisions a future where “you’re not going to be needed to account for security needs when you’re building in cloud environment. You’re not going to be inundated with having to make sure that certain performance characteristics or resilience characteristics are being met.”

Lessons for Founders

Gombach’s experience offers several insights for founders considering category creation:

1. Sometimes the biggest opportunity lies in solving problems that existing categories ignore
2. Category creation requires strong validation from potential customers
3. The initial category definition should address immediate pain points while allowing for future expansion
4. Being first means educating the market about both the problem and your solution

For B2B founders, particularly in technical markets, Gombach’s journey shows how understanding customer pain points deeply enough can reveal opportunities that don’t fit existing categories. The key is having the courage to define a new space rather than forcing your solution into established ones.

As Ian’s experience shows, sometimes the best way to enter a market isn’t by competing in existing categories, but by creating new ones that better address fundamental customer needs.