Dor Knafo and the art of opening fewer doors

A customer can be an awkward collaborator. You build a product to do one thing; they quietly put it to work doing another. At Fireglass, where Dor Knafo worked in security research, large enterprises were using browser-isolation technology to give contractors and temporary employees access to internal applications. Knafo noticed. The detour was pointing toward a problem that deserved a closer look.

Browser isolation created distance between a user and potentially dangerous web content. These customers were finding another use for that separation: letting someone work inside a business without giving them an unnecessarily generous invitation to its systems. An application was the destination. The surrounding network was rather more hospitality than the visitor required.

That observation belongs near the beginning of Knafo’s business story. Axis Security, the company he would co-found in 2018, grew around controlling those connections. HPE completed its acquisition in 2023. By 2025, he had joined Cyberstarts as a general partner, returning to a firm that had backed Axis early. The route connects research, customer behavior and the practical business of making security usable.

The researcher before the founder

Knafo was born in Ashdod, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. He served five years in Unit 8200, working as a senior software engineer in cybersecurity. He also earned a computer-science degree at IDC Herzliya, graduating cum laude. Before he was explaining a company to investors, he was working on the technical details that make confident explanations difficult.

At Fireglass, his research included malware, attacks delivered through the web and reverse engineering. In 2016, he and Fireglass co-founder Dan Amiga took AWS security research to Black Hat USA. Their subject was what attackers could do after gaining access to a cloud account: move between accounts, evade auditing and maintain their foothold.

A year later, they presented at Black Hat Asia on analyzing malicious documents. PDFs and office files were the territory; the difficult trade-offs between detection, isolation, performance and everyday usefulness were the work. It was a practical kind of research. Protecting a system is a more demanding assignment when people insist on continuing to use it.

The document work made the competing demands explicit. A pipeline had to classify incoming content, prepare it for inspection, analyze it, isolate it and potentially disarm and reconstruct it. Each stage introduced choices about accuracy, speed and compatibility. A cautious security tool that prevents useful work soon acquires another problem: people start looking for a way around it.

Fireglass was subsequently acquired by Symantec, where Knafo also worked. Across those roles, the same tension kept presenting itself: the business needed people to connect and accomplish something; the security machinery needed to constrain what those connections could expose.

Sixty conversations, one recurring complaint

His eventual co-founder, Gil Azrielant, was a friend from Unit 8200. They stayed in touch after their service, comparing experiences and discussing the way businesses granted access to applications. Those conversations gave them a shared question. Customer meetings would give the question a sharper shape.

Early in the company’s development, the founders went to the United States for two months and met roughly 60 security leaders. Gili Raanan’s Cyberstarts network helped open the doors. Knafo later remembered the intensity of the trip and the confirmation that “the problem was genuine and recurring.”

There is a pleasantly unglamorous quality to that origin. A security researcher starting a company could fill a presentation with technical ingenuity. Meeting dozens of prospective customers asks for something else: patience with the details of somebody else’s working day. Repetition becomes useful. The same complaint, heard often enough, begins to look like a market.

Axis took on an established field, populated by vendors with large customer bases. Knafo and Azrielant’s proposition was to separate access to an application from access to the wider network. The company would broker the connection and apply controls around the resource the person actually needed.

A smaller key, a larger business

Think of a contractor who needs one business tool. A connection that admits them broadly into the organization creates questions about everything else they might reach. Axis organized its approach around granting a narrower, managed connection. Identity and policy would determine access; the user’s location would not have to define the whole arrangement.

When Axis emerged from stealth in March 2020, it announced $17 million in combined funding. Cyberstarts had provided initial backing; Ten Eleven Ventures led the Series A. Dan Amiga and former Symantec president Michael Fey were among the additional investors. The founders’ technical careers had brought them into contact with people who could help build a business around the technology.

The first public product, Application Access Cloud, emphasized an agentless approach. That mattered particularly for outside partners and contractors, whose devices an enterprise might not manage. Installing another piece of software on every visitor’s machine can turn a simple permission into a small administrative expedition.

By September 2020, Axis had announced a $32 million Series B led by Canaan Partners. A $50 million Series C, led by Spark Capital, followed in March 2021. The company put total funding at about $100 million. Alongside the financing came the less photogenic work of a security business: integrations, monitoring and operational assurance.

In 2021, Knafo and Azrielant were included in Forbes Israel’s 30 Under 30 list. The recognition arrived while Axis was still a young company, founded less than three years earlier. The two founders had already carried their friendship through a different kind of work: explaining a shared technical concern to customers, then building a team around it.

Axis added connections to identity, endpoint and security-monitoring systems, allowing access decisions to draw on tools customers already used. In August 2021, it announced SOC 2 Type II compliance and ISO 27001 certification. The product had to fit into an organization’s existing obligations as well as its network diagram.

Atmos gets a wider remit

In April 2022, Axis unveiled Atmos, expanding from private-application access into a broader Security Service Edge platform. The name was short for atmosphere, a relatively airy choice for a product occupied with the decidedly earthbound question of who may open which application.

The platform brought together zero-trust network access, a secure web gateway, a cloud access security broker and digital experience monitoring. In ordinary terms, it addressed access to private applications, internet traffic, the use of cloud services and the quality of the connection itself.

Axis described 350 edge locations at the launch. Its ambition had grown from a particular access problem into a common place for managing several kinds of connection. Customers could set policies and inspect activity without treating every destination as a completely separate administrative exercise.

That expansion also made user experience part of the security conversation. An authorized connection can still be slow or unreliable. A helpdesk needs to understand whether the difficulty sits with the device, the local provider or the application. Atmos included tools intended to make that diagnosis more visible. Being allowed to work is only the beginning of getting work done.

Extra time for an acquisition

For all the architecture in this story, one of its more memorable moments occurred at a football match. During acquisition discussions with HPE Aruba, contact had gone quiet. Knafo later recalled being at a World Cup game in Qatar when a call arrived to restart the process. As the match went into extra time, he stepped away to take it.

It is a fine collision of competing priorities: the thing you bought a ticket to watch and the thing you have spent years building, both asking for attention at once. Negotiations continued. HPE announced its agreement to acquire Axis on March 2, 2023, and completed the transaction on March 15.

The strategic fit was specific. HPE intended to combine Axis’s cloud-delivered security with Aruba’s networking capabilities, including software-defined wide-area networking. Axis supplied the security-services portion of a wider secure-access offering. A company built around controlling the journey to an application had become part of a much larger networking business.

For Knafo, the acquisition closed the independent-company chapter. It also placed the practical questions behind Axis inside an organization serving customers across a broader network footprint. The customer’s original problem remained recognizable even as the ownership changed.

Back among the beginners

In June 2025, Knafo publicly announced his move to Cyberstarts. The founder had become a general partner at one of his earliest backers. His announcement ended with a modest instruction: “Let’s get to work!”

“My decisions usually start with instinct.”

Dor Knafo

The new role puts him alongside founders working through their own early uncertainties. By January 2026, he was identified as leading Cyberstarts’ investment work on Spirit, a young cybersecurity company then in the process of raising $50 million at a reported $400 million valuation. It was an early-stage assignment, with the product and company still taking shape.

By September 2026, another part of that work involved a more physical kind of infrastructure. Knafo and Raanan were exploring additional Tel Aviv space for Cyberstarts portfolio companies. Growing businesses need somewhere to put their teams. Even an industry devoted to the cloud eventually has a discussion about floors.

The scale of the work has changed since the Fireglass observation. The useful habit remains easy to recognize: look closely at what people are trying to accomplish, and at the awkward route they currently take to get there. Knafo’s career has repeatedly found a business question inside that gap. For the next founder across the table, it is a promising place to begin a conversation.