Evyatar Sagie Turned Search Discipline Into a Cybersecurity Growth Playbook

The search box is an unusually honest focus group. People arrive with a problem, compress it into a few words and expect an answer before their coffee cools. Evyatar Sagie spent the early stretch of his career learning to read those tiny declarations of intent. Long before he was explaining identity protection, managed detection or agentic security, he was working in search-engine marketing, buying media and measuring what happened after a click. It is a practical education for a marketer. The numbers are rude, immediate and wonderfully indifferent to adjectives.

That background now sits behind Sagie’s work as chief marketing officer of Guardz, a cybersecurity company serving managed service providers, or MSPs, that protect small and midsize businesses. His path includes search roles at Uniqueleads.com and Compucall Web Marketing, an entrepreneurial turn with MisterTicket.co.il, work at Check Inc. and Intuit, and acquisition leadership at Next Insurance. The products changed. His central concern did not: find the customer’s real intention, remove the friction around it and connect attention to a result the business can count.

The measurable chapterWhen the traffic chart acquired a steep slope

In May 2017, Sagie was head of acquisition at Next Insurance, then a young company selling digital insurance to American small-business owners. The search challenge was not decorative. Next needed to be discovered in a category crowded with established insurers and expensive commercial keywords. Its potential customers were plumbers, consultants, builders and other owners looking for coverage, often with a purchase already in mind. Ranking for a vague cloud of traffic would be easy to celebrate and useless to the business.

A published account of the work describes a program built around content planning, semantic search and keyword expansion. Over one year, the case study reported a 1,064 percent rise in organic traffic, a 258 percent increase in transactions and 446 percent growth in revenue. Those are program results, not a solo magic trick. They belong to the Next team and its agency collaboration. But they also reveal the kind of brief Sagie was carrying: visibility had to travel all the way to purchase intent.

Search marketing leaves little room for romance, which may be why its practitioners develop a rather useful skepticism. A campaign can attract a crowd and still fail. Sagie’s public recommendations describe him as detail-oriented, technically capable and attentive to return on investment. One former colleague recalled that he could switch between maximizing traffic and maximizing revenue as business needs changed. Another, who worked with him at Intuit, remembered the quality of his feedback. In other words, the spreadsheet did not replace management. It sharpened it.

A change of categoryInsurance, cybersecurity and the sale of an uneventful day

The move from insurance to cybersecurity looks larger on a résumé than it does in a customer’s mind. Both categories ask a buyer to spend money now for protection against trouble later. Both depend on trust. Both become painfully concrete when the protection fails. And both are sold to small-business owners who would prefer to think about customers, payroll and tomorrow morning rather than policies, phishing or ransomware.

There is an important difference in Sagie’s current audience. Guardz does not simply speak past MSPs to the companies they serve. It is built around the provider as the operating channel. An MSP may look after dozens or hundreds of businesses, each with its own users, devices and cloud accounts. A security vendor that adds one more console can add work even while promising safety. Guardz’s proposition is consolidation: connect identities, email, endpoints, cloud and data in one system, then pair automation with human-led detection and response.

This makes Sagie’s job more interesting than polishing a list of features. He has to market an operating model. The MSP needs a story it can believe, a workflow it can manage and an offer it can bring to its own clients. In public posts, Sagie returns to that intermediary again and again. His stated ambition is to help MSPs build a safer digital world for small businesses. The phrase is lofty enough for a banner, but its mechanism is deliberately workmanlike: give the service provider fewer silos and a clearer way to act.

The partnership eraTurning other companies’ strengths into one coherent promise

Guardz’s partnerships make the same point in corporate form. In April 2024, SentinelOne became a strategic partner and investor. Sagie presented the relationship as both technological and commercial: a way to improve the product, widen its reach and better equip MSPs. The message resisted the temptation to treat a famous partner’s logo as the whole story. The useful question was what the combined capabilities would let a provider do.

In November 2025, Guardz announced another strategic technology relationship, this time with Check Point. Harmony Email protection was embedded into the Guardz platform, adding inline, API-based defenses against phishing, business-email compromise and ransomware. Sagie shared the launch with a succinct bit of framing: AI had acquired a new job protecting the inbox. The line is playful, but the product argument is sober. Email protection lives in the same place as the rest of the customer’s security operations, so the MSP is not dispatched to yet another tab.

The financing story matters, too, although capital can be a treacherous protagonist. Guardz announced an $18 million Series A in December 2023. Its $56 million Series B in June 2025 brought total investment to $84 million in a little over two years. Sagie’s own post translated the round into the company’s operating thesis: small businesses should not be left with a patchwork of tools and disconnected detections, and MSPs are the practical route to change that.

This is where an acquisition marketer’s instincts can help a CMO. Funding is an input. Partnerships are inputs. Product capabilities are inputs. None is the customer’s desired outcome. Search taught Sagie to look for the verb hiding behind the noun: the buyer does not merely want cybersecurity; the buyer wants to protect clients, respond faster, reduce manual work and grow a service business without multiplying complexity.

The operator’s advantageKeeping the adjectives on a short leash

Cybersecurity marketing is forever tempted by the dramatic. Threat actors are menacing, the attack surface is expanding and every product would like to be indispensable. Sagie works in that atmosphere, yet his more convincing public language is grounded in systems and constituencies. He talks about identities, emails, devices and data. He credits teams, investors, partners and the MSP community. Gratitude appears in his milestone posts with almost metronomic regularity. It is both manners and market sense: a channel company grows through other people’s conviction.

His professional arc also argues for a less glamorous view of growth. MisterTicket.co.il suggests an early willingness to build. Compucall and Uniqueleads point to the craft bench of media and search. Intuit offered scale. Next Insurance supplied a digital category where acquisition could be tied directly to commercial outcomes. Guardz adds executive scope, partner economics and a technical story spanning multiple attack surfaces. Careers seldom advance in a straight line, but this one has a consistent ruler.

There is a small irony in moving from search to security. Search rewards being found; security rewards keeping unwelcome visitors out. A marketer in either field still has to understand the visitor. At Next, purchase-intent keywords helped distinguish a business owner shopping for coverage from somebody merely browsing. At Guardz, the distinction is between a provider collecting another product and one looking for a manageable way to run security across clients. Sagie’s career has been an exercise in noticing such differences. They are easy to flatten in a campaign and expensive to ignore in a company strategy.

The modern CMO is often asked to be part storyteller, part statistician and part air-traffic controller. Sagie arrived at the role from the statistician’s side, carrying years of campaign feedback and acquisition trade-offs. His public record suggests he kept the operator close. That matters at Guardz because the company’s promise is operational simplicity, not simplicity as a decorative word. If the platform is meant to connect signals, the marketing must connect decisions.

The most revealing thing about Sagie’s career, then, is not a job title or even that four-digit traffic percentage. It is the continuity between a search query and a security alert. Both are signals. Both are useless without context. Both ask someone to decide what happens next. Sagie has spent his working life near that decision, first persuading prospects to move and now helping a company persuade MSPs that security can move as one system. The tools became more complicated. The habit remained admirably plain: pay attention, measure honestly and make the next action easier.