A 28-year-old cyber entrepreneur, married and based in New York, says he left Intel after less than a year, even though the company had offered him a multimillion-dollar retention package, to found Vega, a cybersecurity startup he now co-leads as co-founder and CEO.
He was one of the first employees at Granulate, the performance-optimization startup Intel bought in 2022 for $650 million. As part of the acquisition, early employees received staggered retention grants worth several million dollars in his case, but he says the money did not offset his sense of missing out and losing the feeling of building something transformative. “After about a year I left millions of dollars on the table and went to build Vega,” he said. He added that his parents struggled to understand the decision. Intel shut down Granulate entirely in 2024, about a year after he left.
Vega was founded with fellow former soldier Eli Rosen, whom he had previously brought to Granulate. The two decided to work together again after meeting during reserve duty in the war and seeing the strength of cyber work firsthand. Vega says it detects and investigates threats directly from an organization’s storage environment in real time, allowing deployment in minutes rather than the months required by traditional systems.
The company employs about 140 people, including 90 in Israel and the rest in New York, where the product and development centers are located. In its first two years, Vega raised $185 million at a valuation of about $800 million from investors including Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and Accel. He said the goal is not just prestige but building “a sales machine,” arguing that newer Israeli tech companies now act like real businesses, hire top sales talent, and aim to be number one rather than waiting for an exit. He lives in New York to focus on the U.S. market but says he will return to Israel. In his free time, he cycles, runs marathons, reads, and uses saunas.
