Building a Category From a Help Desk Problem
Asaf Ganot did not set out to define a market. He set out to fix a specific, maddening problem: IT administrators managing Citrix and VMware environments had no real-time visibility into what was actually happening inside them. When employees called the help desk to say their virtual desktops were slow, the IT team would scramble - checking logs, rebooting sessions, guessing. Ganot, who had worked his way up from sysadmin through senior IT roles at companies like BDO Ziv Haft and Jetro Platforms, had seen this script play out too many times.
In 2008, working out of Israel, Ganot and co-founder Yoni Avital built ControlUp to change that script. The idea was surgical: give IT teams real-time visibility and remediation capability inside virtual desktop environments. Start with VDI - Citrix, VMware Horizon - and make IT fast. Not faster. Fast.
It took six years to turn that into a product, and another four to turn the product into a business with 1,000 customers. ControlUp launched its commercial product in 2014 with Ganot as CEO. By 2018, the customer milestone was crossed. By 2020, the company had opened UK and German offices and acquired Scoutbees, adding proactive synthetic monitoring - the ability to simulate what users experience before they actually experience it - to its platform.
Then COVID hit. Remote work went from corporate perk to overnight requirement. "The issues have become more predominant," Ganot said at the time. "It's not just a niche...the same things we've been doing forever, just now with more workloads." The market that ControlUp had been quietly building for a decade suddenly became the most urgent priority in enterprise IT. The $100M Series D in November 2021 was the punctuation mark.
The funding round - co-led by K1 Investment Management and JVP, pushing total funding to $141M - reflected not just ControlUp's scale but the emergence of a new software category: Digital Employee Experience management. DEX. Ganot had been working this territory since before anyone called it that. Now the analysts had caught up. The category had a name. ControlUp had a leader quadrant position.
In August 2023, Ganot made a move that few founders make cleanly: he stepped aside as CEO. Jed Ayres, a channel-sales veteran from IGEL, took over day-to-day operations and go-to-market. Ganot moved to Executive Chairman and took the title of CEO of ControlUp Labs - a deliberate partition of the company into scale (Ayres' domain) and invention (Ganot's).
"Jed's proven leadership and success with channel-driven organizations will help us bring our cutting-edge technologies to a global audience of enterprise customers," Ganot said when the transition was announced. "I am looking forward to partnering with Jed to advance our strategy of delivering the best digital employee experience in the market."
ControlUp Labs promptly acquired Takoto, an Israeli engineering firm focused on automation. The acquisition signaled Ganot's current obsession: autonomous IT. Not just faster IT. Not just better-monitored IT. IT that fixes itself before humans need to intervene. The Autonomous Endpoint Management era, as ControlUp now calls it, has Ganot's fingerprints all over it.
Meanwhile, the company he built keeps compounding. ControlUp ONE - the unified platform license covering both physical and virtual environments - drove 38% of net new ARR in 2024. Pipeline grew 629% year-over-year. ControlUp was named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in DEX Management Tools for the second consecutive year in 2025. There are 4,700+ Certified ControlUp Experts working in IT departments around the world. The ControlUp ONE platform holds a 4.7 out of 5-star rating from 220+ reviews.
What Ganot built is not a monitoring tool that grew up. It is an answer to a question that enterprise IT has been asking since the first virtual desktop was deployed: how do you know what employees are actually experiencing, and how do you fix it before they have to ask? That question is now answered at scale, by a company that one Israeli sysadmin decided to build because no one else was doing it right.