Ofer Amitai and the work that waits between an alert and a fix

The beer came before the unpacking. Ofer Amitai had landed in Tel Aviv and gone straight from the airport to meet his team. In the photograph, the tables are crowded with plates and glasses, the street behind them has the unvarnished look of a working city, and the founder is pleased to be there. A few months earlier, he recalled, the company had consisted of three people and a whiteboard. Now it had an office, a team and, to his apparent delight, plants.

Plants are a modest milestone in the venture business. They seldom appear in a funding announcement. Yet for someone who has already built a cybersecurity company, handed over its daily running and started again, they mark something tangible: an idea has acquired a place to live. Amitai called himself jetlagged and admitted to fear of missing out. The arrival of colleagues, even more than the arrival of capital, was worth a detour.

His new company is Onit Security. He is its co-founder and chief product officer, alongside chief executive Elad Ben Meir and chief technology officer Tom Winter. Before Onit, he co-founded Portnox, served as its CTO and became its CEO in 2015. That history gives him two perspectives on enterprise security: the person who builds the controls, and the person whose company must live with the consequences when a control fails.

The device at the door

Amitai’s professional life began well before the startup photographs. From 1991 to 2001, he worked in the Israeli Air Force, heading security and connectivity teams. His career included establishing its first IT security team, managing the security division at Xpert Integrated Systems and serving as a Microsoft regional director of security. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Open University of Israel. Networks were a working responsibility long before they became his company’s proposition.

Portnox’s own history dates its founding to 2007 and names four founders: Amitai, Idan Kuperman, Nir Aran and Ben Kapuler. Its early question was deceptively simple. What, exactly, is connected to the corporate network? Knowing the approved laptop inventory would only take an administrator so far. Other devices could arrive, connect and acquire access. The practical job was to see them, assess them and decide what they could do.

The company records Amdocs as the first customer to deploy Portnox CORE in 2008. Support expanded across wired and wireless networks the following year, with device risk assessment and remediation capabilities added in 2010. These are undramatic milestones, which is appropriate. Much of network security consists of ensuring that a machine doing something ordinary cannot quietly acquire extraordinary privileges.

In January 2014, Portnox relocated Amitai to its New Jersey headquarters as it expanded in North America. Aran, then CEO, credited him with leading platform design and development from the beginning, with customer experience shaping the work. Amitai continued with product planning, design, market research and technology partnerships; Juda Thitron took responsibility for daily research and development operations. The engineer’s job was already widening into the customer’s world.

Security, minus the machinery

When Portnox introduced CLEAR in 2017, it took network access control into the cloud. The setting had changed: remote offices, employee devices and connected equipment complicated the old idea of a neatly bounded workplace. CLEAR could identify devices and their owners, compare information with known threats, quarantine a device and enforce updates or compliance changes. Customers could manage the service themselves or obtain it through a service provider.

Amitai was discussing the same practical concern in interviews that year. Visibility came first, then risk assessment, segmentation, behavior monitoring and automated control. In an InformationWeek conversation at Interop ITX in Las Vegas, the emphasis was on security that employees without specialist security training could use. Portnox won the event’s security award. An accessible product and a technical product were allowed to be the same thing.

There was a commercial reason to care about accessibility. A midsize organization might have a complicated network without a proportionately large staff to manage it. Portnox reported that its SaaS revenues increased by 250 percent year over year in 2018 and that its SaaS customer base doubled. Amitai associated demand with a simpler approach to deployment and management. The figures belonged to the company; the product bet was one he had helped make.

By the third quarter of 2019, Portnox reported revenue 40 percent above the corresponding period a year earlier. Amitai described the company’s commitment to CLEAR and the subscription model as a substantial bet. Software delivered as a service changed more than the invoice. It changed where the machinery lived and how much of it the customer had to tend. The promise was useful security without turning every organization into a security software workshop.

A known flaw, left waiting

Then the security company itself was breached. In late 2020, attackers broke into Portnox’s servers and stole data. Portnox identified the group as Pay2Key, which had been linked to Iran. Years later, the episode would become part of the explanation for Onit’s existence. The new company described a known vulnerability buried in a backlog, a weakness that remained available while the organization worked through other demands.

The word “known” matters. It moves the problem beyond discovery. Finding a flaw does not ensure that someone owns the affected asset, has authority to change it, understands the business consequences and carries the repair through. Between an alert and a completed fix sits a small organizational expedition. A ticket can travel quite a distance while the vulnerable system remains exactly where it was.

In March 2026, Amitai publicly described the incident as something that had changed his view of security. He compared it to someone breaking into your home. He also explained that conversations with Ben Meir and Winter had begun as conversations between neighbors. They wanted to spare other security leaders the experience. A corporate failure had followed him into ordinary life and, eventually, into the next company’s design.

“We didn't want any other CISO to feel that way.”Ofer Amitai, on the conversations behind Onit

There is an uncomfortable honesty in that origin. A founder in cybersecurity has to sell confidence, while a breach supplies a lesson in its limits. Amitai has chosen to make that lesson part of the next undertaking. Onit’s focus falls on the space where knowledge should become action: identifying responsibility, making a decision and ensuring the same decision can address similar exposures again.

Leaving a company without leaving its people

The transition out of Portnox came in stages. In January 2022, the company announced $22 million in growth financing led by Elsewhere Partners. Denny LeCompte became CEO, and Portnox established its global headquarters in Austin. Amitai returned to the CTO role and joined the newly formed board, with responsibility for engineering in Israel and international product teams. The business was being given a new operating structure.

By his 2023 farewell to active roles, Amitai described selling a majority of the company to Elsewhere and continuing to contribute from the board. His inventory of startup work included coding, quality assurance, customer installations, sales, patent paperwork and producing Portnox CDs. The optical disc deserves its moment. Before the cloud removes the box, somebody has to make sure the box contains the software.

He also remembered cleaning the office. “Nothing was ‘beneath’ me,” he wrote. As specialists arrived, he was glad to see them perform jobs better than he had. That is an unusually useful detail in a founder’s retrospective. A growing company asks its creator to surrender portions of the work, and eventually the operating title itself. Amitai’s account gives the people who took over those tasks their due.

“My passion lies in creation.”Ofer Amitai, reflecting on his departure from active Portnox roles

Back to three people and a whiteboard

Onit was founded in 2025. In March 2026, it announced an $11 million seed round led by Hetz Ventures and Brightmind Partners. The founding team brought experience from Portnox, SCADAfence and For-Each, businesses associated respectively with private equity, Honeywell and Autodesk transactions. Those histories belong to the team collectively. Amitai brought his own years of product work, customer contact and company building to a problem he had encountered personally.

The company calls its approach decision-based exposure management. Its stated aim is to turn a security judgment into an operating rule that agents can apply repeatedly. Humans supply judgment; software handles execution, with final human approval required before a fix is implemented. For Amitai, now responsible for product, the challenge is to make that division useful in actual organizations. Ownership, context and permissions must survive contact with the systems and people already there.

His curiosity also extends beyond the next product release. In 2018, he discussed blockchain as a possible trust mechanism for machines communicating with other machines, using autonomous ships and cars finding parking as examples. These were proposals about a possible future. In 2021, he argued for restrictions and oversight of cryptocurrency transfers to disrupt ransomware financing. He was willing to consider both a technology’s utility and the abuses its surrounding system might enable.

There is room for less solemn thinking, too. After coffee with Check Point’s Dorit Dor in New York, he shared lessons about doing more with less, knowing a company’s distinctive advantage and staying curious. A mathematical novel, Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, made the reading list. Back in Tel Aviv, the plants made the progress report. Amid funding rounds and security diagrams, Amitai notices the small evidence that people have begun making something together. The whiteboard has company again.