"Cold outbound stopped working for our buyers a long time ago. What did work was getting in front of security leaders with a real signal, from a real face. Spear is the engine that made that motion possible, and a meaningful part of how we got to where we are."
Co-Founder and CEO, Astrix Security
About Astrix Security
Astrix Security is the pioneer of AI agent security. Founded in 2021 in Tel Aviv by Unit 8200 veterans Alon Jackson and Idan Gour, the company helps enterprises discover, manage, and secure the machine identities, API keys, service accounts, tokens, and increasingly autonomous AI agents, that now vastly outnumber human users and represent one of the fastest-growing attack surfaces in security.
Backed by Menlo Ventures, Workday Ventures, Bessemer, CRV and others, Astrix grew quickly into a category leader serving Fortune 500 security teams. In May 2026, Cisco announced the acquisition of Astrix for approximately $400 million, folding its technology into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Duo, and Secure Access.
Astrix's buyers are among the hardest in the industry to reach: CISOs, VPs of Security, identity architects, and IAM leaders at the largest enterprises in the world – people who don't take cold calls and don't reply to generic email. That's where Spear came in, from nearly the company's earliest days.
Reaching gate-kept security buyers –without burning the brand
Astrix had a category-defining product and a clear set of target accounts. The hard part was access. Their ICP sits at the very top of the security org, surrounded by gatekeepers and buried in vendor noise. For this audience traditional outbbound was the wrong instrument entirely.
Three constraints shaped the challenge:
- The most credible people had the least time. The founders – a CEO and CTO with strong personal standing in the security community – were exactly who buyers wanted to hear from, and exactly the people who couldn't spend hours prospecting.
- Quality mattered more than volume. One irrelevant touch to the wrong CISO at the wrong moment could quietly poison an account for a year. Spray-and-pray was a liability, not a strategy.
- The calendar ran on events. RSA, Black Hat, Identiverse – the moments that move security deals — only pay off if you reach the right people with the right context before the doors open.
Astrix needed a way to put their founders' faces and voices in front of the right security leaders, at the right moment, at a scale no human could sustain manually.
An executive-led, trigger-based outbound engine
Astrix connected the executives' own LinkedIn profiles – CEO Alon Jackson, CTO Idan Gour, and Head of Business Development, Achiad Alter – and later their sales team, to Spear. Instead of an SDR sending volume from an unknown name, outreach now came from the people the market already wanted to talk to.
Every message was tied to a real signal. Rather than blasting lists, Spear surfaced prospects in a genuine buying moment and paired each one with a specific trigger – a relevant post, an article, a new role, a company event, a partnership. Across the partnership, Astrix and their dedicated Spear GTM engineer built 92 campaigns, tuned over time around what the data showed actually worked.
The trigger mix reflected how security buyers really surface: physical-event signals led the way, followed by LinkedIn activity, published articles, and company-activity triggers like partnerships and product launches – the raw material for event-led plays around RSA, Black Hat, and Identiverse.
"This is the most valuable tool we've had as an outreach team. We want to squeeze as much juice out of it as we can — so our leaders, especially Alon Jackson, see the results. It helps all of us hit our number."
A founder-led pipeline into the world's biggest enterprises
The executive-led motion did what cold outbound never could for this audience. Across the partnership, Spear surfaced 15,136 trigger-based prospects. From 7,937 connection requests, Astrix earned 2,341 connections – a 29.5% connection rate, roughly four times the LinkedIn platform average. Of those who connected, nearly one in three replied, well above the industry benchmark.
15,136
Trigger-based prospects surfaced
7,937
Connection requests sent
2,941
Connections (29.5%)
941
Replies (~32% of connections)
124
Meetings booked
Full-funnel results across all connected profiles, Dec 2024 – 2026.
The motion was front-loaded and fast. The three founders booked more than 50 meetings in their first six months live, peaking at 18 in a single month – roughly three booked meetings per active profile, per month, from buyers who almost never answer outbound. As Astrix scaled toward its exit and the founders' time tightened, they handed the engine to their sales team, who carried it forward.
Most importantly, those meetings were with exactly the calibre of account Astrix is built to serve. Of the 77 meetings booked across 74 companies, 39 were with enterprises of 10,000+ employees. The founders' own profiles opened doors at the very top: the CEO's profile alone booked meetings with security leaders at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Warner Bros. Discovery, S&P Global, and PayPal.
And it lasted. Astrix first signed in late 2024, renewed into 2026, and extended the motion from the founders to their growing sales team – a multi-profile engine that kept producing enterprise conversations right up to the Cisco acquisition.
"I love it because it's like doing double time — while I'm doing my prospecting, it's doing its prospecting. Double the benefit, especially coming from Alon and Idan's profile."
Where the meetings landed
A selection of the enterprises whose security leaders took meetings with Astrix through Spear:
- JPMorgan Chase
- Bank of America
- Citi
- BlackRock
- Amazon Web Services
- Adobe
- PayPal
- Shopify
- ServiceNow
- TikTok
- Warner Bros. Discovery
- Paramount
- United Airlines
- Best Buy
- CVS Health
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Accenture
- KPMG
- Nokia
- Charter Communications
- S&P Global
- GitLab
- Northern Trust
- Royal Caribbean
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