The useful clue in Rita Gurevich's career is a job that should not have existed. In 2008, Lehman Brothers was breaking apart. Barclays and Nomura were buying pieces of the failed bank, which meant somebody had to decide which technology assets went where. Data, applications, servers, systems, accounts: the corporate wreckage did not arrive neatly labeled. Gurevich, then a young technologist in Lehman's IT department, joined the team charged with untangling it.
This was not the triumphant first act a founder would order from central casting. It was an administrative epic, full of ownership questions, access questions and risk. Yet it revealed an enduring flaw inside large organizations. They buy tools faster than they retire permissions. People move roles. Teams rename themselves. Accounts outlive employees. Groups sit inside other groups until the family tree resembles royal Europe. Eventually, no one can say with confidence who owns what or why a certain person can open a certain digital door.
Gurevich had entered Lehman through Stevens Institute of Technology's co-op program. She completed three placements there, asked to keep returning, and joined full time after graduating in 2006 with a background in computer science and mathematics. The relationships proved as important as the coursework. When the bank disappeared, colleagues scattered across Wall Street. The problem she had just learned to solve followed them.
“Soon, my age became just another number.”Rita Gurevich, on winning over early clients
The kitchen-table department of everything
In 2010, at 25, Gurevich started SPHERE from her kitchen. She called former Lehman colleagues who had moved to other financial institutions and offered help with data security and access controls. The company was singular in the grammatical sense. When early clients bought a service from “we,” Gurevich would arrive to perform it. She has recalled explaining that the salesperson was also the lawyer, accountant and receptionist. The only department with more than one chair may have been the kitchen.
Selling sophisticated security work to banks in the aftermath of a financial crisis was not the gentle setting. It did, however, provide demanding customers and difficult edge cases immediately. SPHERE could not win by appearing larger than it was. It had to understand the mess, finish the cleanup and return with an answer that held up under scrutiny.
Gurevich's account of those years is refreshingly short on mysticism. Relationships opened doors, especially the network formed at Lehman. Delivery kept the doors open. “The only way to grow and maintain the relationship is to deliver value,” she later said. That distinction became an operating principle: trust may create an introduction, but the work must renew the trust.
First do it by hand. Then find the pattern.
SPHERE began as a services company. Its people assessed access and remediated what they found. Gurevich once called them “access-control janitors,” a phrase with more useful honesty than most category design. The work was not glamorous. It involved collecting data, finding owners, asking the same necessary questions and fixing permissions. The virtue of such work is that repetition eventually gives up its secrets.
The team noticed that much of the heavy lifting followed a pattern. Collection could be automated. Ownership information could be enriched. Permissions across systems could be standardized. Projects that once consumed long stretches of human effort became faster. Those lessons were productized into SPHEREboard, a platform designed to discover identity and access problems, give them business context and automate remediation.
There is a neat founder lesson here, but it should not be made too neat. Manual work does not magically become good software. The advantage was the catalogue of abnormalities SPHERE encountered while being paid to reach an end state. The product was built backwards from the cleanup rather than forwards from an attractive demo. Common sense and logic, Gurevich has said, mattered because the team had seen the nuances in real environments.
SPHERE did not abandon services when it built software. It added managed services alongside the platform. Gurevich's reasoning is pragmatic: cybersecurity does not have an easy button, and customers still benefit from expertise. Software handles repeated work at scale. People interpret context, deal with oddities and help the program continue after the ceremonial launch meeting.
Eleven years before the money
SPHERE remained bootstrapped for eleven years. That choice forced capital conservation and allowed the company to refine a proven approach before accepting venture backing. In February 2021, Forgepoint Capital led a $10 million Series A. In November 2022, Edison Partners led a $31 million Series B, with Forgepoint participating. The second round was intended to expand the SaaS product, alliances, channel ecosystem, sales and marketing.
The funding makes a clean milestone, but the more interesting number is eleven. It represents years of building while selling, learning while delivering and preserving enough independence to decide what the company actually was. Gurevich has described limited resources as a condition that required SPHERE to “build as we drove.” Many founders would find that terrifying. She found it exciting.
The company in her own image, slightly untidy
Gurevich's public persona combines operator's specificity with a willingness to be silly in front of her team. She writes about ownership data and circular group nesting, but also office taste tests involving deviled ham. At a 2026 CyberArk event, she rejected the idea that a CEO should float above the expo floor. She wanted to tell the story, hear customers describe real problems and inspect what appeared in the demo. She also reported losing the internal contest between light mode and dark mode. The electorate had spoken.
That proximity fits the business. SPHERE's product depends on discovering what formal diagrams miss. A service account without an owner. A privilege inherited through a nested group. An old identity that still works. These are small details with an unfortunate gift for becoming large incidents. A founder who remains curious about the booth conversation is keeping close to the raw material.
Her interest in mentorship is similarly direct. Gurevich has spoken about the guidance she received and the responsibility to pass it on, especially to women considering entrepreneurship and technology careers. She committed publicly to mentoring women and helping employees design career paths, using her own network when useful. Her awards include EY's Entrepreneurial Winning Women recognition, a SmartCEO Brava Award, NJBIZ's 40 Under 40 and the 2025 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards' CEO of the Year. She returned to Stevens in 2023 as a visiting entrepreneur, making the co-op student-to-founder loop pleasingly complete.
New Jersey is more than a dateline in that loop. Gurevich has described the satisfaction of creating a company in her home state while building a global presence. Hoboken supplied the university and early kitchen table; nearby financial institutions supplied a market; Newark later became SPHERE's company address. This is a local story with enterprise plumbing underneath it. The skyline across the river matters, but so does refusing the assumption that a serious technology company must move elsewhere to be taken seriously. SPHERE grew near the relationships that produced its first customers and the technical community that trained its founder. Geography, in this case, behaved like another clean piece of infrastructure: close to the problem, connected to the network and owned with unusual clarity.
“We were a bootstrapped company with limited resources, and we needed to build as we drove.”Rita Gurevich
Cleaning up after the future
The language around SPHERE has evolved from data governance to cyber hygiene to identity hygiene and identity intelligence. The underlying claim has stayed consistent. Advanced technology needs a clean foundation. Gurevich once compared it to decorating a cluttered house: new artwork will not rescue the room. In security, AI and other sophisticated tools cannot compensate for invisible accounts, unclear ownership and excessive permissions.
That argument has become more urgent as identities multiply. Employees are joined by service accounts, machines and AI agents. SPHERE's recent work emphasizes continuous discovery, context and automated remediation across this growing population. In 2025 the company published a long-form interview in which Gurevich discussed identity blind spots and the role of automation and AI. In February 2026, SPHERE reported its strongest year on record for 2025. Later in 2026, it announced a bidirectional integration with SailPoint and was recognized as an Intellyx Digital Innovator.
The company's aspiration is not a grand finale in which every permission is correct forever. People continue to join, leave and change jobs; access follows unless someone or something notices. Identity hygiene is therefore a practice, closer to brushing teeth than unveiling a monument. The janitorial metaphor has merely acquired software, venture capital and better typography.
Gurevich's story endures because its inciting incident remains visible inside the product. A giant institution fell apart, and the technology underneath proved difficult to divide because ownership and access were murky. She learned to map the mess, built a service to clean it, watched the patterns repeat and turned those patterns into a platform. The playbook is available to any operator willing to look where fashionable founders seldom linger: inside the cupboard, behind the nested group, under the work nobody wants.