What we talked about
Gidi Cohen joins the PreVetted Podcast to share his remarkable journey as a serial entrepreneur, cybersecurity veteran, and now Co-founder & CEO of Bonfi.AI. With over two decades of experience building Skybox Security into a global enterprise and advising leading security companies like OTORIO and Octarine, Gidi has spent his career at the intersection of technology, risk, and trust. Today, he’s channeling that expertise into solving one of the biggest challenges of the AI era: making unstructured data ( whether human or AI-generated ) secure, compliant, and trustworthy.
Show notes
Gidi Cohen argues that most cybersecurity tools have spent decades securing the pipes, the network, identity, and infrastructure layers, while almost entirely ignoring what flows through them. His new company, Bonfy.AI, is built around the conviction that unstructured content moving across email, chat, and SaaS platforms is the real attack surface of the AI era, and that the existing solutions for controlling it simply do not work.
What we covered
- Gidi describes AI adoption as moving roughly five times faster than the cloud security wave that preceded it, creating a situation where organizations face enormous risk before the industry has had time to develop reliable defenses, a dynamic he finds both alarming and genuinely exciting as a founder.
- The core problem Bonfy tackles is that data loss prevention tools have had poor accuracy for years, generating so many false positives and false negatives that security teams stopped trusting them. Gidi argues that without accuracy, no policy enforcement system can work, and that gap is what Bonfy is built to close.
- Bonfy’s platform inspects content as it moves, emails, chat messages, file uploads, SaaS activity, automatically applies business context to classify risk, and can either alert on or block dangerous transfers in real time, providing both granular per-content risk scores and an aggregated organizational risk picture.
- Gidi introduced his concept of “techno feudalism,” a trend he sees as the inverse of meritocracy: as foundational AI models require massive compute, energy, land, and GPU resources, power concentrates among a handful of companies rather than rising with individual skill and effort, which he views as a serious societal risk.
- On the question of compliance, he predicts regulations will arrive, and likely overcorrect, but that the more urgent shift is for organizations to treat AI data security as part of the fabric of adoption from day one, rather than bolting controls on afterward the way the industry did with cloud.
- His advice to founders building deep enterprise technology: obsess over the product, ensure it genuinely solves the problem (not just checks a compliance box), make it fast to deploy and simple to operate, and align every aspect of the go-to-market strategy with the product reality rather than retrofitting them later.
About Gidi
Gidi Cohen is a serial entrepreneur and cybersecurity veteran who spent over two decades building and scaling Skybox Security, including through multiple significant liquidity events. He is now CEO and co-founder of Bonfy.AI, focused on AI data security for enterprise organizations.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gidicohen
- Website: https://www.bonfy.ai
Episode 43 of the PreVetted Podcast.