Eldar Tuvey insists several times that “this is not the Eldar and Roy Show” during a conversation at the London headquarters of their virus-busting cloud computing business ScanSafe. Really? Mr Tuvey and his brother Roy set up ScanSafe in 2004. They recently agreed to sell it to Cisco Systems for $183m (£110m, €122m), a transaction estimated to make them each about £18m better off. Given the patchy record of London technology businesses in achieving lucrative exits, they have done extra¬ordinarily well. So how, exactly, is this not the Eldar and Roy Show?

Eldar, a sardonic, purposeful man in an open-necked shirt, is worried that ScanSafe’s story might be simplified into a tale of two ex-City boys making shedloads of dosh. In fact, he argues, the business story is more interesting, but more demanding to follow.“We’re all about business, unfortunately,” says Eldar, ScanSafe’s chief executive, when asked where the company keeps the pool table that is a feature of wackier Web 2.0 workplaces. Perhaps Eldar and Roy, the company president, were always more serious than that – they tut-tut over another technology company they know where staff expect a supply of free smoothies. Perhaps they have had any wackiness knocked out of them by an entrepreneurial career more gruelling than an outline of the Cisco deal suggests.

The brothers, who were born in Israel but grew up in London, set up Mailround, an e-mail marketing business, in 1999. Eldar, then 29, had been a corporate financier at Goldman Sachs. Roy, then 24, had worked at Merrill Lynch and Compass Partners, a private equity firm. “I was very young,” says Roy, “but if you see an opportunity, you’ve got to go for it.” But the business struggled. The demand, as so many late-1990s technology start-ups found, was simply not there.Chase Capital, which had put $5m into Mailround, asked for its money back. Unusually for the time, the Tuveys had not blown the start-up capital on over-specified systems development and travel by private jet. But a bruising dispute followed. It was resolved when the brothers bought Chase out for a percentage of its original outlay.

Eldar compares the subsequent situation to that of the mythical frog in a pan of water that is slowly heating up. The frog does not sense slow temperature changes, so it boils to death. But the Tuvey brothers knew they were cooking and wanted to hop back into investment banking.“We were boiling, roasting, very slowly – while all the hedge fund guys were flashing their yachts around,” Eldar says. They were working long hours for £24,000 each a year in a rented office on the roof of a building in Farringdon, at the western edge of the City of London. The office did not have planning permission. Or a lift.

Their father, Isaac, also an entrepreneur, was the one who stopped them jumping. “He is what I would call ‘old school’,” Roy says. “He appreciates people who give it some elbow grease.” In 2004, the brothers had the brainwave of converting Mailround in¬to an internet security company. Then, as now, most business customers bought anti-virus protection as software downloaded from the web or installed from a disc. Their insight was to see a big future for cloud computing, in which applications and data are run and stored on remote servers. They would offer security in the same way, under the banner “software as a service” (SaaS).
Support has come from the expertise of John Edwards, chief technology officer, and advice and start-up capital came from Balderton, the venture capital firm. Balderton has made a 10-fold return on its initial investment and has contributed to subsequent financings that have taken the total raised to $43.5m, winding up with a 35 per cent stake.

“We have been riding two big waves,” Eldar says. “One was the web security wave, where the threat was mov¬ing from the inbox to the brow¬ser. The other, which we are still riding, is the move to cloud computing.” In the early days, customers were sometimes reluctant to switch to an online security service. What typically convinced them was the low cost and high convenience of SaaS. Growth in customer numbers created “a virtuous circle”, according to Roy, where “the more traffic that we saw, the better we got at stopping threats before anyone else”.

The Tuveys are cagey about figures. They say ScanSafe, now occupying smart of¬fices in central London, breaks even on sales to “a few thousand customers”. This is not very revealing since customer licences can cover anything from 25 to several thousand “seats” or individual users. Data company IDC estimates Scan¬safe’s revenues at $23m in 2008, compared with $17m in 2007. IDC believes that the business has about 30 per cent of the nascent market for SaaS web security. The total market for IT security has been valued at $54bn, so there is plenty to play for.

Cisco’s acquisition of ScanSafe is intended to allow it to offer customers a better pack¬age when they move from workplace-based computing to the cloud, a shift that paranoia about data security can impede.
Intriguingly, the Tuveys plan to stay at Scan¬safe after it becomes a business unit of the US networking giant, which they say has a strong record in integrating acquisitions.
Bernard Liautaud, founder of Business Objects, the enterprise software group, and general partner at Balderton, says: “They feel that they have an opportunity to see their business grow very rapidly. The deal increases their market reach 10 times, if not 100 times.” He characterises the brothers as “funny, smart and very driven”.

They plainly enjoy working together. Perhaps the tensions of mixing business and a family relationship are eased by geographical distance. Roy runs Scan¬safe’s Silicon Valley office, credited with the company’s breakthrough into the US market. His self-mocking persona is that of the put-upon kid brother. He implies, for ex¬am¬ple, that he was co-opted into leading the US push because Eldar could not be bothered to commission a headhunter to recruit externally.

Asked how they complement one another, Roy dutifully replies: “Eldar is more creative and visionary.” Eldar thinks for a moment, and responds solemnly: “Roy is less creative and visionary.” Then he adds that his brother is “delivery-focused”. “He means that I have good Excel skills,” Roy deadpans. Eldar heads off the record during one anecdote, saying: “Don’t repeat me, but ...” Roy decides to butt in: “He’s a journalist Eldar. It’s his job.” Brothers wind each other up. But they also watch each other’s backs