Founder · Cybersecurity · Boston
Lior Div
He spent a career taking hackers apart. Now he is building AI agents to defend against them — at machine speed.
He spent a career taking hackers apart. Now he is building AI agents to defend against them — at machine speed.
Lior Div is the CEO and co-founder of 7AI, a Boston startup putting swarms of autonomous AI agents to work inside the security operations center. The idea is direct: hand the tedious, repetitive investigation work to agents that never sleep, and give human analysts their judgment back.
Div launched 7AI in 2025 with Yonatan Striem-Amit, his co-founder from Cybereason. Within roughly ten months the company came out of stealth and closed a $130 million Series A led by Index Ventures, with Greylock, CRV, Spark Capital, and Blackstone joining in. It landed as one of the largest Series A rounds in the history of cybersecurity.
This is his second act in the same fight. Div co-founded Cybereason in 2012 and grew it into a unicorn built on a contrarian premise: use offensive hacking skills to power defense. 7AI extends that logic into the age of AI agents. As he frames it, autonomous agents handle triage, context, and conclusions, while people set strategy and own the calls that matter.
Agentic security platform. Swarming AI agents that automate incident response end to end.
Co-founder and CEO. Endpoint-detection unicorn headquartered near Boston.
Six years in Israel's elite intelligence corps, leading a team that hacked the hackers.
Div grew up in Israel and was dyslexic as a child. The standard phonetic approach to reading did not work for him, and he fell behind. His way in was to take the system apart: he says he learned to read by reverse-engineering his first-grade teacher's comprehension methods. That instinct - understand how a thing really works by disassembling it - would define everything that came next.
At 18 he joined the military and spent six years in Unit 8200, Israel's signals-intelligence corps, often compared to the U.S. National Security Agency. He rose to command a team of more than 20 people specializing in forensics, reverse engineering, and encryption. Their job, as he describes it, was to hack the hackers. For his leadership he received the Head of Intelligence Corps Medal of Honor.
His perspective shifted around 2010, when covert cyber operations against Iran's nuclear program became public knowledge. Seeing software weaponized on a national scale made the broader risk obvious to him: if code could attack anything, ordinary businesses and civilians needed a shield. He left classified work to build one in the commercial world.
“I don't believe one person can build what we are doing.
— Lior Div, on leadership
In 2012 Div founded Cybereason in Tel Aviv with Yonatan Striem-Amit and Yossi Naar, then moved the company to the Boston area near Copley Square. It grew from a small operation into a 200-plus person organization with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, reached unicorn status in 2019, and helped define the endpoint-detection-and-response category - including the “Malops” concept Div and Striem-Amit coined for tracking malicious operations rather than isolated alerts.
7AI is the reunion. Div is CEO; Striem-Amit is CTO. The pitch is that security teams are drowning in alerts and burning out on work that machines are better suited to do. Rather than making people faster at that grind, 7AI hands it to agents. As Div puts it, the mission is not to make people more efficient at non-human work - it is to give tedious but necessary tasks to agents that are faster, more consistent, and infinitely scalable.
Notably, Div and his team were building AI security agents before “agent” became the industry's defining buzzword. The company's framing of the modern SOC - autonomous investigation with humans directing the swarm - is now catching up to a vision they set early.
The core Cybereason founding duo, back together at 7AI. Div leads as CEO; Striem-Amit is CTO and the inventor of the Malops approach.
7AI's $130M Series A was led by Index Ventures, with Greylock, CRV, Spark Capital, and Blackstone joining.
He credits his dyslexia as an advantage - it trained his brain to reverse-engineer systems.
His Unit 8200 team's actual job was to hack the hackers.
He reunited the core Cybereason founding partnership at 7AI, with Yonatan Striem-Amit as CTO.
The name 7AI nods to an always-on, 24/7 vision of AI-driven security.
He was building AI security agents before “agent” became the industry's default word for them.