Alarum’s second act: how Safe-T became a web-data company
Alarum Technologies looks like a long-established public company on paper, but the business investors see today is the product of several reinventions. Its legal entity dates to 1989, its operating story was reset through a 2016 merger with Safe-T Data, and its present identity is built mainly around NetNut, a platform for collecting public web data through a large network of internet addresses.
That distinction matters. Alarum is no longer best understood as the cybersecurity company suggested by its former Safe-T name, nor as the consumer internet-access business it later tried to build. It is now a business-to-business data-infrastructure company whose customers use proxy networks, automated collection tools and ready-made datasets for jobs such as price comparison, search analysis, advertising verification and AI model development.
A public-company shell finds an operating business
Alarum’s corporate history starts in Israel in December 1989. The entity was inactive apart from administration between June 2011 and June 2016, according to its annual filing. On 15 June 2016 it acquired all of Safe-T Data in a merger, after which Safe-T’s secure-access technology became the operating core. The company’s ordinary shares had traded in Tel Aviv since 2000, while American depositary shares began trading on Nasdaq in August 2018 under the symbol SFET.
The original Safe-T pitch centred on controlling how employees and outside parties reached sensitive corporate systems. That placed the company in the broad secure-access market now associated with products such as Zscaler Internet Access. But Safe-T did not remain a single-product cybersecurity story. Acquisitions and internal investment gradually moved the centre of gravity toward consumer internet access and, more decisively, web-data collection.
NetNut becomes the centre of the company
NetNut supplies what Alarum calls an internet protocol proxy network, or IPPN. In practical terms, a customer can send web requests through different residential, internet-service-provider and data-centre IP addresses. That helps a retailer check how prices appear in different markets, an advertising company verify where an advert is displayed, or a data team collect public pages at a scale that would be difficult from one connection.
The network is only one layer. Alarum has expanded into collection products that return structured search-engine results, gather information from sites with anti-bot protections, and deliver prepared datasets. The shift is important because it moves the company beyond selling bandwidth. A tool that collects and structures information can solve more of a customer’s workflow, but it also requires more servers, engineering and third-party services.
This is different from a content-delivery network such as Cloudflare CDN, which primarily brings website content closer to visitors. NetNut helps a customer reach public websites through a distributed pool of addresses and convert the responses into usable data. The underlying infrastructure may look similar from a distance, but the direction and purpose of the traffic are different.
Why Safe-T became Alarum
The company changed its name to Alarum Technologies on 8 January 2023, and its Nasdaq and Tel Aviv ticker changed to ALAR later that month. The new identity acknowledged how far the operating business had moved from Safe-T’s original security focus.
Another turn followed in July 2023, when management decided to scale down CyberKick, its consumer internet-access subsidiary. Alarum continued serving existing paying users but cut expenses and headcount, describing the remaining operation as a way to earn revenue from past customer-acquisition spending at minimal ongoing cost. From that point, NetNut’s business customers and web-data products became the clearest way to judge the group.
Growth came with a sharp change in economics
Alarum reported $40.7 million of revenue for 2025, up 28% from $31.8 million in 2024. The most striking change was inside that total: data-collection solutions and datasets generated $11.1 million, compared with just $0.6 million a year earlier. The company attributed much of the increase to demand from a large customer building foundational AI models as well as sales of newer products.
Revenue growth did not translate into comparable profit growth. Cost of revenue more than doubled to $16.9 million as network, server, subcontractor and third-party costs rose. Gross profit was almost flat at $23.8 million, operating profit fell from $6.7 million to $0.2 million, and net profit declined from $5.8 million to $1 million. Operating cash flow also swung from $8.9 million generated in 2024 to $2 million used in 2025, partly because trade receivables increased.
Those figures reveal the central question facing Alarum: can the company turn demand for AI-era data into durable, well-priced business rather than traffic-heavy revenue with thin incremental margins? The answer depends on product mix, infrastructure efficiency, payment collection and whether demand broadens beyond a small number of large users.
The risks are not theoretical
Web-data collection sits at the intersection of technology, contracts, privacy and intellectual-property rules. Information being publicly viewable does not remove every legal or ethical obligation. Customers still need to consider website terms, personal-data laws and the permitted use of collected material, while Alarum must protect the reliability and reputation of the IP network that carries their requests.
Customer concentration and variable usage create another exposure. Alarum itself identifies diversification as important because the loss of a significant customer—or simply a large reduction in that customer’s activity—could materially affect sales and margins. The 2025 results demonstrate both sides of that dependence: one AI customer helped lift revenue, while the traffic required to serve new collection work drove costs substantially higher.
There is also fresh uncertainty. In August 2026 Alarum disclosed legal proceedings in Israel and the United States connected with matters reported in July. On 27 August it delayed publishing its results for the three and six months ended June 2026 because of the continuing effect of recently announced developments, and said it expected significant operating and net losses. Those filings do not establish the final outcome of the proceedings, but they make the delayed results and subsequent disclosures essential reading.
What to watch next
Alarum’s transformation is real: a dormant legal entity became Safe-T, Safe-T became a mixed security and consumer-access group, and NetNut turned it into a web-data company. The next stage is less about another name change and more about execution.
Three measures will show whether the strategy is working: revenue that is spread across more customers, gross profit that grows at least as quickly as sales, and cash collection that keeps pace with reported income. Product announcements may explain where management wants to go, but those operating measures will show whether web-data demand is creating a stronger company.
