Hed Kovetz once had a job in which understanding people mattered rather more than understanding their passwords. After leaving Israel’s military, he worked as a bartender. He wanted a break before returning to technology. The work brought late nights, unfamiliar faces and a different sort of education in human behavior.
Years later, talking about that interval, he credited bartending with teaching him about treating people and working with them, lessons he carried into management and sales. Asked for a wild story, he declined to provide the entertainment. Apparently some access requests still require refusal.
The episode supplies a useful introduction to the CEO and co-founder of Silverfort. His professional biography includes intelligence work, cybersecurity products and a law degree. Yet he also makes room for a period spent meeting people across a bar. There is no need to turn it into a secret formula for entrepreneurship. He says he learned something there. That is interesting enough.
His later work concerns a more technical version of a familiar difficulty: deciding who should get through, under which circumstances, and how much trouble a mistaken admission might cause. A valid identity can make someone appear welcome long after there is reason to be suspicious.
A very respectable way to break in
Before Silverfort, Kovetz served as a group leader in Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces. His company biography records unit excellence awards and the Chief of Intelligence Corps Award for Innovation. He later held product leadership roles at Verint. He also earned an LL.B. from Tel Aviv University, an academic detail that sits a little unexpectedly in a cybersecurity résumé.
At Verint, his work included a cybersecurity platform operating at national scale. His professional biography describes leading five teams during his intelligence service and winning Verint’s innovation competition. This was experience with systems, teams and difficult technical problems well before he had a startup to sell.
In a 2020 interview, Kovetz described the concern that became Silverfort’s starting point. A stolen password lets an attacker impersonate a legitimate user. The intruder can then approach systems through an entrance intended for ordinary business. The password may pass inspection even when its new owner emphatically should not.
Kovetz, Yaron Kassner and Matan Fattal founded Silverfort in 2016. Rather than assuming that the world needed another isolated authentication product, they spoke to security executives. What they heard changed the shape of the problem. Organizations already had protections, but those protections covered separate pieces of the enterprise.
One system might secure web applications, another a network gateway, another cloud resources. Each could do its assigned job while leaving the organization with an incomplete picture. Kovetz’s explanation was practical: the gaps between these systems were allowing identities to be misused. The company’s task became extending protection across those gaps.
That distinction matters to anyone who has accumulated software faster than they have retired it. An enterprise has old applications, new services and infrastructure that continues to work well enough to avoid replacement. A security idea has to survive contact with that untidy collection. Tidiness is rarely in the procurement budget.
The price of taking the longer route
Kovetz grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, with an engineer father and an artist mother. In discussing his upbringing, he has connected its communal life with the collaborative company he wanted to build. His account of founding Silverfort also emphasizes how much the initial idea changed after conversations with customers. The problem remained; the proposed answer evolved.
He has been unusually willing to discuss the cost of inventing a different technical approach. In a conversation about Silverfort’s early decisions, he remembered watching other founders build and sell companies while his own journey was taking longer. Explaining the technology to customers and investors became part of the work.
“Why would you want to be a me too?” he asked. The conviction was real, but his later account resists treating the result as proof that the choice had been straightforward. By the time a founder can comfortably explain a difficult decision, the listener already knows that the company survived it.
He also invested early in channel partnerships, accepting a delay before those relationships produced business. The same interview described his continued involvement in hiring, with teamwork an explicit consideration. Taken together, these choices suggest a founder trying to make several slow investments at once: technology, distribution and the people expected to hold them together.
There is a particular discipline in admitting that a successful decision was costly. It gives the story an actual price. An investor presentation can compress several uncertain years into a neat arrow pointing upward. Living through those years offers fewer arrows and considerably less certainty.
“Why would you want to be a me too?”Hed Kovetz, on Silverfort’s early product decision
When the numbers finally caught up
On January 23, 2024, Silverfort announced a $116 million Series D led by Brighton Park Capital, bringing disclosed funding at that point to $222 million. Existing investors participating included Acrew Capital, Greenfield Partners, Citi Ventures, General Motors Ventures, Maor Investments, Vintage Investment Partners and Singtel Innov8.
The announcement reported revenue growing by more than 100 percent year over year and more than 100 customers being added each quarter. Those were company-reported measures at the time of the round. They show the scale of the business Silverfort said it had reached, rather than a personal fortune for its founder.
The money was attached to an argument Kovetz had been making for years: organizations needed a security layer spanning their existing identity systems, including resources that were difficult to protect with conventional methods. Funding gave that argument a larger operating budget. It also made the challenge of turning a technical approach into a durable organization more substantial.
By March 2025, Kovetz was reporting more than 1,000 enterprise customers and over 450 employees worldwide. Writing about Silverfort’s inclusion in Fast Company’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies list, he put gross customer retention at 94 percent and described revenue increasing by nearly 100 percent annually over the preceding five years.
An award is a pleasant occasion for a photograph. The more revealing part of that update was the accumulation behind it: customers to support, employees to coordinate and products expected to work together. The founder who once had to persuade people that his approach made sense now had to ensure that a larger business could keep delivering it.
Buying more of the missing pieces
In November 2024, Silverfort acquired Rezonate, a cloud identity security company. Kovetz presented the transaction as a way to extend Silverfort further into cloud environments and bring protection for human and non-human identities into a more unified platform. His announcement set mid-2025 as the intended integration timetable.
The logic followed the original problem. If fragmented identity systems create gaps, a growing security company has to keep finding the boundaries of its own coverage. Rezonate brought cloud-focused capabilities including identity threat detection, security posture management and entitlement management. The acquisition widened what Silverfort intended to cover.
Growing the company also meant bringing in executives with experience selling identity software. Howard Greenfield joined in June 2025 as president and chief revenue officer, after roles that included chief revenue officer at SailPoint and Centrify. Silverfort paired his arrival with an interview about the business and its next stage.
Greenfield described a company moving from a handful of principal offerings toward a broader platform. He emphasized how products get implemented and used in daily work, alongside plans to expand the partner ecosystem. That is a useful companion to Kovetz’s technical story: someone still has to help the customer make the machinery fit.
A founder can spend years establishing a point of view and then discover that growth requires more people capable of arguing for it, installing it and improving it. The expanding leadership team makes that transition visible. Kovetz’s work increasingly includes choosing the people who will carry decisions he once handled much more directly.
The next identity may never have been a person
By April 2026, Silverfort’s acquisition agenda had reached Fabrix Security. Its announcement proposed combining Fabrix’s AI-based identity decision technology with Silverfort’s runtime access enforcement. The stated aim was autonomous protection for human, machine and AI-agent identities, operating at a speed manual decisions could struggle to match.
This was an announced direction, with integration and execution still the work to be done. The interesting continuity is the question beneath it. Kovetz began with people whose credentials could be stolen. Software services and AI agents extend the same access problem to actors that can operate without waiting for a human to type.
His public writing had already followed that shift. A June 2025 Forbes Technology Council article addressed how executives might balance the opportunities of AI agents with cyber risk. In 2026, he also appeared in an NYSE Floor Talk interview at RSAC. Identity had become a subject for executive conversations as well as specialist engineering discussions.
The larger ambition is to make protection work across the different identities and environments a business actually uses. It is an ambition whose scope keeps moving. Each new kind of software actor gives an organization another reason to ask who is acting, what access it needs and when permission should end.
There is room in this story for the less ceremonial Kovetz, too. In an earlier interview, he declared his allegiance to Android and described young children supplying the morning wake-up call he had never especially wanted. The founder managing long horizons still had a household timetable with rather immediate enforcement.
Bartending, intelligence work and running an identity security company make an unusual sequence on a résumé. Kovetz has spoken about learning from all three. His company’s continuing task is to make admission less automatic, even when the paperwork looks impeccable. A familiar name at the door is only the beginning of the conversation.