Silicon Valley’s Hot Talent Pipeline Is an Israeli Army Unit

Unit 8200 has become an incubator for cybersecurity startups defending the world’s biggest companies against hackers

By Miles Kruppa and Alex Perry. WSJ

Where you come from matters in the quest for Silicon Valley investment money, be it the sandstone arcades of the Stanford University campus or the graffitied offices of early Facebook. Venture capitalists are now coveting a new class of founders—those who served in a specialized unit of the Israeli army.

Members of Unit 8200, known for its advanced cybersecurity and cyberwarfare capabilities, have founded dozens of cybersecurity companies. Others have become influential venture capitalists in their own rights and are mentors to entrepreneurial graduates.

There are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni publicly traded in the U.S., together worth around $160 billion. Private companies started by ex-8200 soldiers are worth billions more.

The largest, cloud-security company Wiz, in July came close to signing a $23 billion deal to be bought by Google. It would have been Google’s biggest acquisition ever. After the talks fell apart, Wiz Chief Executive and 8200 veteran Assaf Rappaport told employees he wants to hit $1 billion in revenue before planning a public-market listing.

Wiz and the 8200 alumni are targeting a massive business problem—how to keep big companies secure—with skills and an intensity they learned from their time in the military. They and the companies they’ve built have become hot commodities as more industries move huge amounts of business documents to the cloud—which is constantly under attack from opportunistic hackers. While Unit 8200 alumni once talked about their service in hushed tones, they now tout it in press releases to attract clients and investment money for their startups.

Palo Alto Networks, the biggest publicly traded cybersecurity company, and itself a product of the 8200 pipeline, has purchased several companies led by alumni of the unit in recent years. Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital, two of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture-capital firms, have recently hired Israel-based partners.

Elsewhere, Silicon Valley's investment engine has been slowing down. Startup money is harder to come by than it was a few years ago, and venture investment has fallen by about half from a peak in 2022.

The Israeli military recruits for Unit 8200 as early as grade school, scouring robotics clubs and after-school coding programs for talent. Once soldiers have worked in the unit, they typically stay in touch with commanders and fellow recruits for life.

A Unit 8200 alumni association that is based in Tel Aviv hosts business-skills training events and webinars for members. They often host meetups with other soldiers they worked with in the past in cities worldwide.

'You can do anything'
While a part of Unit 8200, they learn practical cybersecurity techniques and the most-up-to-date surveillance tactics, alumni say. Their focus on Israel's national security allows them to understand cyber-offense and cyber-defense once they leave the service.

Unit 8200 encourages its recruits to question their superiors and tackle complex problems without known so- lutions. Many say that this high-pressure culture and on-the-spot thinking are part of what make them good at business outside of the military.

"It almost makes you feel like you can do anything," said Kobi Samboursky of his six years in Unit 8200. Samboursky founded venture-capital firm Glilot Capital Partners in 2011 and named it after the unit's military base outside of Tel Aviv. "I've gone through tougher situations, so what's a deadline? What's a competitor? What's an investor? Everything looks kind of easier."

Most of the companies Tel-Aviv- based Glilot Capital's first $30 million fund invested in were led by former soldiers from the unit. The fund's value has gained 84.1% annually after fees since then, Samboursky said. He likes to find teams with co-founders from Unit 8200 because it means they have worked through tough situations together, he said.

"There's incredible freedom to operate at a young age, and the problems you're presented with are quite raw," said Yotam Segev, CEO of Cyera, a company that was founded by former Unit 8200 officers in 2021. Like Wiz, Cyera scans business files in the cloud for potential data security vulnerabilities. It raised $300 million in April from investors who valued the company at $1.4 billion. Segev started Cyera in New York with a fellow Unit 8200 veteran, Tamar BarIlan, to commercialize techniques for securing data in the cloud that he had worked on while in the military. When he began seeking funding, others from the unit suggested he talk to venture capitalist Gili Raanan, an early backer of Wiz through his venture-capital firm Cyberstarts, based in the Israeli Beach town of Mikhmoret. Raanan became Cyera's first investor.

Raanan later recommended Cyera to Doug Leone, a senior partner at Sequoia. Leone has overseen Sequoia investments in four companies led by former Unit 8200 soldiers, all of which have also been backed by Cyberstarts.

When Sanaz Yashar, a fellow Unit 8200 soldier, was raising money for her cybersecurity startup Zafran, Segev recommended that she follow the same path and seek funding from Leone.

"He's almost from our own unit," Yashar recalled Segev telling her about Leone. "He's from the neigh- borhood."

Yashar, who immigrated to Israel from Iran at the age of 17, was recruited for Unit 8200 while studying biology at Tel Aviv University. Early in the process, an officer brought her to a windowless meeting room and showed her how to remotely access an Iranian military officer's device and intercept his communications.

"The adrenaline that you feel in your blood in that moment is not something I can compare to anything else,” Yashar said. She served for 15 years, eventually overseeing a department of analysts.

Yashar said she increasingly sees young people enter Unit 8200 because they think it's the best path to becoming tech leaders. She was disappointed that recent enrollees asked her about hiring and salaries at tech companies when she visited to give a lecture a few years ago.

"It's time to understand that the mission is more important than any- thing else, and the technology is just an enabler for the mission," Yashar said.

Gathering signals Unit 8200 is a division of Israel's military-intelligence body, Aman. It is particularly skilled at gathering communications and electronic signals from foreign adversaries such as Iran. It also develops cybersecurity systems for protecting the country's networks and infiltrating others. The unit has played a key role in the country's recent conflicts, including its current war against Hamas in Gaza.

Several thousand people serve in Unit 8200 at any given time as part of Israel's mandatory military service for most citizens beginning at age 18. To get in, they have to pass multiple technical tests and training courses. Not everyone focuses on computer science. Alumni said they served alongside experts in language and physics.

It was only recently that talking about Unit 8200 publicly became less taboo. Older alumni say that when they were in active duty, they couldn't talk about the unit openly. It has changed organizationally over the years. For example, the unit's cyber department was only formed over the last 20 years.

When Glilot Capital's Samboursky joined 8200 in the 1990s, the intelligence-gathering unit operated with so much secrecy that he had no idea his older sister was already a mem- ber.

In one high-profile operation, Unit 8200 worked with the U.S. National Security Agency on a cyber sabotage project called Stuxnet that was later revealed to have infiltrated an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility in 2010. Israel and the U.S. haven't publicly commented on their roles in the attack.

Unit 8200 alumni who founded cybersecurity company NSO Group created software called Pegasus, which has been used by governments to access the devices of journalists and embassy workers, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The department put NSO Group on an export prohibition list three years ago, a decision its executives are working to reverse. This means exports from the U.S. to the company of both hardware and software will be blocked, unless the Commerce Department grants a license for a transaction.

Shalev Hulio, a former Unit 8200 soldier who oversaw NSO Group until 2022, has defended Pegasus as a tool for preventing terrorist attacks and infiltrating criminal networks.

No interrupting
Yoav Regev, CEO of data-security software firm Sentra, joined Unit 8200 as a coder in 1997 and left in 2021 after serving as the head of its cyber department.

Regev said that many unit members like to joke that the most important mission for commanders is to not interrupt the people who report to them. He said resilience is the top lesson members pick up while serving.

"I talk to investors and then after a while say, 'Hey, it's been 10 minutes, I didn't mention 8200,' and everybody laughs," said Gadi Evron, CEO of cybersecurity startup Knostic and a former member of the unit.

Wiz CEO Rappaport in previous interviews has called 8200 "the best school of entrepreneurship." A Wiz representative declined requests for interviews with Rappaport and his co-founders.

Cyberstarts' Raanan first met Rappaport in 2012. Rappaport had left 8200 and was starting a California-based cybersecurity company, Adallom. Then an Israel-based partner at Sequoia, Raanan heard about Rappaport's plans and gave him a call.

Rappaport rejected his offer to meet, telling Raanan that venture capitalists liked to push founders out of their own businesses, the investor recalled.

Raanan eventually convinced Rappaport to take his money after pitching the CEO's co-founders at Sequoia's offices on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Less than three years later, Rappaport sold Adallom to Microsoft for $320 million. Sequoia and other early investors made a decent return.

After Rappaport and his co-founders left Microsoft in 2020, they turned to Cyberstarts again to fund their next business, even though they weren't sure what it would be.

Wiz eventually settled on making a software product that allows security teams to continuously scan their files for cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the cloud. Rappaport set up head-quarters in New York, with a satellite office in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli tech scene has reached enough critical mass that Israel's popular TV comedy series "Eretz Nehederet" mocked it. A 2021 sketch featured a long-haired character named Nadir Hackerman, founder of the fictional company Webos. In the sketch, he walks barefoot around the open-floor-plan office, replete with a ball-pit and videogames.

A LinkedIn profile for the character said he completed his military service at the age of 12 in a "secret super duper unit."