Alex Vovk and the unfinished business of starting again

In August 2024, Alex Vovk had something many founders spend years trying to obtain: interest from potential buyers. Action1, the security company he ran with Mike Walters, had received acquisition inquiries. Vovk acknowledged the financial opportunities. Then the company announced that it would remain independent. Six years into their next venture, the two founders were choosing a longer appointment with the same problem.

The decision gives Vovk’s career a useful point of entry. He had already spent about twelve years building Netwrix with Walters. Another startup meant another stretch of product decisions, recruiting, customer demands, and work that would still need doing on Monday. Action1’s subject was software patching. It is a field in which success often means that nothing especially interesting happens. Nobody sends a congratulatory email because their laptop remained uneventful.

Vovk’s public record is full of those practical concerns: how to manage computers beyond the office, how to let employees make decisions, how to finance a company without handing over its direction. Read together, they make a portrait of a founder repeatedly choosing responsibility for the machinery.

Twelve years, then a fresh set of keys

Before the chief executive titles, there was software architecture. Vovk worked at Aelita Software, serving as an architect for key technologies. He holds a PhD in information security as well as a master’s degree. That combination put him close to both the design of systems and the question of how those systems could be protected.

In 2006, he and Walters co-founded Netwrix. Its work centered on visibility into IT systems, data access, and changes: helping organizations understand who had done what in their infrastructure. The partnership endured through roughly twelve years of building the company. By the time the pair moved to their next venture, they had experience running a security business together across an extended period.

Action1’s public startup announcement arrived in July 2018. Vovk was named CEO; Walters became president, responsible for product strategy. The announcement described a browser-based service that could discover endpoints and retrieve live security information. Their second company began with a familiar division of responsibility and a different part of the security problem.

There is a particular continuity in taking the same partner into a new business. The next idea gets a fresh start; the working relationship brings a history. Walters has subsequently described their enjoyment of building startups as a reason to begin again. Vovk’s second act therefore carried something an entirely new founding team would have had to develop: years of shared work.

The computer had left the building

Vovk’s explanation of the opportunity begins with a mismatch. Organizations were adopting cloud technology and distributing their teams, while their endpoint-management tools often remained anchored to a server inside the company. The people could work elsewhere. Supporting their machines was another matter.

A computer away from the corporate network still needed software, updates, and help when something failed. Building management around its return to the office made less sense as work became more distributed. Action1 put management in the cloud so IT teams could reach those devices without relying on the old perimeter.

The consequences are easy to picture. A software update is available. An administrator has many machines to maintain. Each delay leaves another item on the list. Repeat the exercise across operating systems, applications, and locations, and a modest maintenance task becomes a substantial coordination problem. Patching has the social standing of washing up, with rather more alarming consequences for leaving it until tomorrow.

Action1’s approach joins vulnerability discovery with remediation. Administrators can identify affected software and deploy updates through the same platform. Its peer-to-peer distribution also lets nearby endpoints exchange portions of downloaded files, reducing duplicate transfers over a shared connection. The design tackles the logistics behind the apparently simple instruction to install an update.

Room to do the work

Ask a software founder what makes a company valuable and a feature list is always within reach. In a July 2021 interview, Vovk instead emphasized the team. His answer to what people might not know about Action1 was that recruiting and retaining talented professionals had been a priority. He called people “the key asset of any business.”

He has described his management approach as democratic, giving employees room to set goals and strategies within their areas of responsibility. The founders communicate the vision and desired outcomes. Team members have latitude in how they pursue them. It is a specific allocation of authority, with the destination set more centrally than every turn along the route.

“We avoid micromanaging our employees.”

Alex Vovk, on his management approach

That approach places demands on a leader, too. Giving someone responsibility requires an intelligible brief and a way to get help. Vovk says both founders remain approachable when questions arise. The combination matters: space to act, alongside access to the people who set the direction. Otherwise autonomy can become an elegant word for being left alone with an unclear assignment.

An expensive way to say we’re staying

The financial decisions make Vovk’s preference for independence more concrete. In June 2023, Action1 announced plans to invest $20 million in its platform, including research and development around a zero-knowledge security architecture. The stated concern was the security of the management system itself, an obvious point of responsibility for software entrusted with reaching many other computers.

Walters later described the founders reinvesting $20 million of their own capital. That account distinguishes the commitment from an outside funding round. The two entrepreneurs were putting resources into the business they continued to control. Their emphasis on revenue and independent ownership had also appeared in earlier discussions of how they wanted Action1 to develop.

Then came the August 2024 announcement. Action1 said it had received multiple acquisition inquiries over the preceding year. Vovk said that “remaining founder-led is the best path forward.” He acknowledged that turning away from financial opportunities was difficult. The statement was unusually direct about a choice that startup storytelling often treats as a foregone conclusion.

Independence is a continuing operating arrangement. Product investment, staffing, and customer promises remain the founders’ responsibility. Their stated vision was to prevent attacks that exploit software vulnerabilities across devices, operating systems, and applications. Keeping the company meant keeping the task of making progress toward that goal.

That security emphasis had another public expression in June 2024, when Action1 signed CISA’s Secure by Design Pledge and announced its CSA STAR Level 1 self-assessment. For a company selling the ability to administer other people’s machines, attention to its own software is part of the bargain. The administrator is placing trust in the tool that delivers the fix. Responsibility runs in both directions.

The bigger customer at the door

Action1 subsequently reported 327% year-over-year revenue growth for 2024. In the first half of 2026, it reported a further 76% increase compared with the same period a year earlier. Those are company figures, and they describe different periods. Together they give a sense of how much the business had expanded after the independence announcement.

The larger customer became a more visible part of the picture. For H1 2026, Action1 reported that annual recurring revenue from six-figure deals booked during the period rose 275% year over year. The number of customers with annual recurring revenue above $100,000 increased 167%. Customer retention remained at 98%.

For Vovk, that expansion changes the scale of the operating question. Larger organizations bring more complicated environments and more expectations about integrations, controls, and accountability. His comments accompanying the results emphasized closing vulnerabilities without adding disconnected tools or administrative work. The company’s original concern about practical complexity was still present, now inside bigger customer relationships.

The product broadened as well. In August 2026, Action1 announced endpoint configuration management and enrollment and provisioning modules. These are separately licensed additions. They extend its work into bringing Windows devices under management and maintaining approved configurations. A founder who began by discussing computers outside the office was now overseeing a wider set of duties across their working lives.

Its expansion also appeared in published business rankings. Inc. placed Action1 at No. 29 in 2025 and No. 60 in 2026. Deloitte placed it at No. 16 on the 2025 Technology Fast 500. The lists measure growth over their own reporting periods, so their numbers describe separate comparisons. Those placements put the business he led alongside other companies being measured on revenue growth, years after he and Walters had begun their second venture.

A longer appointment with the problem

Alongside that enterprise expansion, Action1 keeps its core platform free for the first 200 endpoints. It offers a small organization a way to use the product and a larger one a way to test it in a real environment. The free allowance and the separately licensed additions are distinct parts of the offering. Both sit within a business that must earn enough to keep investing.

Vovk is based in Irvine, California, where he lives with his wife and three children. His working partnership with Walters has now crossed two companies and two decades of security entrepreneurship. The public choices are consistent: build with a familiar collaborator, recruit people who can take responsibility, and retain the ability to decide what the business does next.

That makes the 2024 decision an instructive place to return. Receiving interest from buyers gave the founders an opportunity to change their relationship with the work. They elected to keep it. For Vovk, starting again has become a commitment to staying: with the team, with the customers, and with all those computers that still need their updates.