Eyal Gruner went to a bank with his parents to open an account. He came away with the beginnings of a career. Still a teenager, he found that a terminal offered a route into the bank’s internal systems. The discovery brought him to the attention of the bank, which hired him to test its security. Most first bank accounts introduce their owners to interest. His introduced him to an employer.
“They eventually hired me as a pen tester,” he recalled. The abbreviation is for penetration tester: someone paid to find the openings an intruder might use. It is an unusual conversion of teenage curiosity into professional responsibility. The boy examining a machine became the person an institution trusted to examine its defenses.
Gruner’s career would take him through consulting, online fraud prevention, a company sale, investing and the founding of Cynet. Across those jobs, a question kept returning: how could organizations surround themselves with security technology and remain so difficult to protect? He would eventually build a business around the work that accumulated between the products.
A bank account, and an unexpected job
His interest had begun at school in Jerusalem. A computer worm disrupted the network games he wanted to play during breaks. He researched the problem and helped his computer teacher clean the machines. Later came paid work for the bank and the security company Aladdin. By sixteen and a half, he was setting up BugSec, a consultancy devoted to finding security weaknesses.
That sequence has a pleasingly practical beginning. A game stopped working. There was a reason to investigate. The investigation turned into a skill someone would pay for. The future company founder first had to solve a problem at the scale of a school computer room.
Consulting then placed him inside other organizations’ problems. A security test asks whether the defenses work together under pressure. Buying decisions happen product by product; an intruder can look across the whole arrangement. That difference helps explain the direction his later work took. The opportunity lay in how a customer’s protection functioned as a whole.
The first sale did not settle the question
Versafe, which Gruner co-founded, concentrated on online fraud, phishing and malware. Its offering combined technology with a security operations center, where specialists could identify threats and help customers respond. The service protected web and mobile activity without asking each user to download software or register a device.
F5 announced its acquisition of Versafe in September 2013. It described the company’s technology as an extension of its existing security and access products. The attraction included the people watching for new attacks as well as the software. Gruner joined a transaction in which protection was already a continuing service, requiring observation and response.
Cash consideration for Versafe recorded in F5’s fiscal 2013 filing.
The sale gave his career a clear milestone. A buyer had found a place for the product inside a larger business. It also left a decision about what to do next. A successful transaction can make the next ambition harder to explain: the obvious financial argument has already had its turn.
By 2015 he had founded Cynet. A year later, when the company announced $7 million from Lazarus, he described an ambition to build a large Israeli company that would last for years. The founders had initially funded the business themselves. The new undertaking came with a longer horizon than getting a product ready for a buyer.
- 2005BugSec
Security consulting - 2013Versafe acquired
Online fraud protection - 2015Cynet founded
Integrated protection - 2025Move to the board
A new operating CEO
Who has to make it all work?
Gruner argued that separate security products left customers with a demanding assembly job. Installation was followed by integration, maintenance and the daily task of interpreting what the systems reported. Smaller organizations had to find people with the expertise to manage that arrangement, as well as money to buy it.
His answer at Cynet was to bring multiple capabilities into one platform. There is a recognizable customer problem underneath the technical language. Each purchase may make sense on its own. The collection can still become difficult to operate. Somewhere, someone must decide which warning matters and what to do about it.
He was making the argument publicly by 2017, describing the proliferation of products inside company networks as a complication for security staff. His proposed remedy was a platform they could manage more easily. It was a choice about where to compete: take responsibility for more of the working arrangement.
The distinction matters to the person responsible for security. A new capability arrives with decisions about who watches it, who understands it and who takes action when it signals trouble. Gruner’s proposition puts those questions inside the product discussion. The customer is buying a way of working as well as software.
That choice also creates an obligation. A unified interface is useful only if the work behind it holds together. A customer cannot spend the afternoon admiring the neatness of the dashboard. There are still incidents to investigate. Simplicity has to survive contact with the job.
A conceptual view of Cynet’s integration thesis, rather than a product architecture diagram.
The smaller team at the other end
The company’s funding announcements show how the idea developed. Its $13 million Series B brought backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Shlomo Kramer and returning investor Ibex Investors. Cynet described a platform bringing endpoint detection, user behavior analysis, network analytics and an around-the-clock security operations service together.
In March 2021, it announced a $40 million Series C led by Greenfield Partners. The pitch joined automated investigation and response with a managed detection and response service included for customers. Security researcher Chris Roberts joined as chief security strategist. The operating proposition involved both automation and access to experienced people.
A 2022 Cynet survey put numbers around the intended customer’s predicament. It questioned 200 security leaders at organizations with no more than five security staff and budgets of $1 million or less. Eighty-seven percent reported difficulty managing and operating their threat-protection products. Overlapping capabilities and trouble seeing an attack’s full scope were among the problems they identified.
Cynet survey of 200 security leaders. Respondents had teams of five or fewer and security budgets of $1 million or less.
The survey was commissioned by a company selling a remedy for this burden; its figures describe that respondent group. Still, the daily problem is concrete. Five people have to cover a great deal of ground. A system that needs constant tending consumes the time of the people it is supposed to help.
A second chair at the table
Gruner also became an investor. Cymulate explicitly acknowledged his seed investment in its 2021 funding announcement. The company works on continuous security validation: testing defenses against simulated threats. It is a neighboring question to Cynet’s, concerned with checking whether the protection an organization has assembled actually performs.
Cycode’s board page lists him among its directors. Its field is application security, extending his professional connections into the systems through which software is built and secured. These roles give his career a wider shape than the sequence of businesses he personally ran.
Backing a founder changes the use of experience. The investor is available to question a decision or recognize a familiar difficulty, while the operating team has to carry the business forward. Gruner has spoken about warning founders against repeating his mistakes. The useful inheritance is a little less expensive trial and error.
“There is always a bar and a higher bar.”
Eyal Gruner, 2021
Learning to hand over the keys
In February 2025, Cynet announced that Jason Magee would succeed Gruner as CEO. Gruner joined the board and became a strategic advisor to the executive team. He had led the process to select his successor. The announcement described a transition he helped arrange, keeping him connected to the company he founded.
Magee brought experience as CEO of ConnectWise, a business deeply connected to managed service providers. His early priorities at Cynet included investing in partner relationships and expanding sales and marketing. The next job involved helping the company reach more customers through the organizations that already managed their technology.
The handover gives the story a different kind of milestone from the Versafe sale. The business continues independently, with a new operating leader and its founder still involved. For anyone measuring an ambition in years, the ability to change that arrangement is part of what has to be built.
For Gruner, the move changed the form of participation. A founder can remain responsible for a company’s direction without continuing to make every operating decision. Cynet’s current board listing identifies him as founder and board director. The ambition to build something enduring now includes another person running it.
Even the robots have job descriptions
His public life includes smaller details than funding rounds and board appointments. In a 2021 questionnaire, he listed travel, animals and extreme sports among his interests. He described living in Tel Aviv with four dogs and two cats. It is a busy domestic counterweight to the professional project of simplifying systems.
In the same questionnaire, he spoke favorably about remote work. Moving between meetings without travel could save time and expense, he argued, while people could still think and work together productively. It was another example of his interest in the machinery surrounding a job: how much effort goes into doing the work, and how much goes into arranging it.
More recently, he shared an account of an AI team-lead agent attempting to dismiss a DevOps agent. The supposed insubordination had a mundane explanation: the DevOps agent had instructions allowing it only to read, while the task required a change. Gruner treated the disagreement as office politics arriving in software.
The joke fits his professional history. Systems meet other systems, their instructions collide, and somebody has to understand what happened between them. Years after the bank visit, there is still an opening worth investigating. This time, it may be the gap between a manager’s request and a robot’s job description.