Friendship Was the Point—Now Cyera Is Worth $12 Billion

My recent conversation with Yotam Segev wasn’t the first time I’ve had a CEO tell me about starting a company with a friend. But it is the first I’ve heard of the friendship being the reason for starting the company.

Segev met Tamar Bar-Ilan and Yonatan Itai in 2010 when they started their Israel Defense Forces service and joined its Talpiot program, a secretive and selective tech leadership academy. After their service, he said he “couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with those guys. I loved them and trusted them and thought they were the absolute best at what they do, and that was the catalyst for us.”

Cyera, founded in 2021, eventually would become an AI data-security company now valued at $12 billion. But initially the three worked with venture-capital firm Cyberstarts, which gave them access to hundreds of companies to find out what they might need.

“It was let’s identify a problem that matters enough, that is important enough, that is valuable enough, that is painful enough, that customers will want to work with us on it,” said Segev, Cyera’s CEO.

“We really honed in on the data sprawl problem. The lack of visibility to data that the enterprise has, and all the problems that that created.”

Then there was the matter of securing that data, which has become even more critical in the age of AI and autonomous agents. “I used to joke that Cyera had legs before AI, but with AI, it’s got wings. It’s a completely different company in that sense.”

Along the way, Segev has had to learn how to be a CEO. He was able to grow “into it with the company,” he said. “You know, there was a time when I was the CEO of three people, then I was the CEO of 30 people, 300 people, and now 1,600, 1,700 people.”

Still, he knew he needed help. In choosing investors and board members, it was very important to him “to make sure that those people that have had the experience, that have done it before, that have seen it before, that I have the right cast of people around me to challenge me, to support me, to coach me.”

He recalled a conversation with board member Frank Slootman, the former Snowflake and ServiceNow CEO, who he said told him, “It’s not about how much money you’re burning. …It’s more about building a fit company.” Segev said “that completely changed the way I thought about it.”

In the first year, Segev, Bar-Ilan and Itai would work until 2 or 3 a.m. Before riding their bikes home each night, they had a joke where they’d say to each other “if we fail, we’ll say that we learned a lot. Let’s succeed, right? Like, let’s not fail. Let’s just make it work.”

Erle NortonManaging Editor, C-Suite Content

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CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from The WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor.

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