Founder at Cyberstarts · Joined 2018
View Live Interactive Profile →Gili Raanan's cybersecurity career began inside Israel's elite Unit 8200 intelligence corps, where he served for a decade and won both the IDF Innovation Award and the Israel Defense Presidential Prize. He founded two security companies - Sanctum, creator of the first web application firewall, and nLayers, later acquired by EMC - before spending nearly nine years as a General Partner at Sequoia Capital leading its Israeli cybersecurity investing, including the earliest bet on Adallom, the company Wiz's founders had built before Wiz itself. He left Sequoia in 2018 to found Cyberstarts, and led Wiz's $6 million seed round in 2020, partnering with the company from day one. That bet became the largest venture-backed exit in history when Google completed its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz in March 2026. Raanan is also widely credited as the inventor of CAPTCHA and holds more than 10 U.S. patents in cybersecurity and application management.