Shahar Ben-Hador rose from IT administrator to a company's first chief security officer. Then he went and built the tool he wishes had existed on those long, alert-flooded nights.
Most people who sell security software have never carried a pager. Shahar Ben-Hador did. Before he was a founder pitching investors, he was the person a company called when something went wrong at 3am, the one staring at a screen full of alerts trying to figure out which one was the real fire. That job left a mark. Radiant Security, the company he leads today, is in many ways an argument with his own past.
Ben-Hador's route into cybersecurity was not the polished, credential-first path you might expect from a Silicon Valley CEO. He studied mathematics and computer science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, then took a job at Imperva doing IT infrastructure - the plumbing of a company, servers and networks and the unglamorous work of keeping things running. What followed was a slow, earned climb.
Over roughly a decade at Imperva, Ben-Hador worked his way up until the company named him its first-ever Chief Information Security Officer. That detail matters. He didn't inherit a security program someone else designed; he built the role from the ground up, defining what "protecting this company" actually meant in practice. Later he took on a VP and general manager title before moving on.
There's a story from those early CISO days that he still points to: facing a direct threat from the hacking collective Anonymous. It's the kind of experience you can't simulate in a slide deck. When your company is the target and the pressure is real, you learn what it actually feels like inside a security operations center when the noise turns into an emergency. That memory sits underneath everything he builds now.
"Work hard, don't look for shortcuts, and share both successes and failures with your team."
Shahar Ben-HadorAfter Imperva he joined Exabeam, first as CIO and then as VP of Product Management. That move - from running security to shaping the products other security teams would buy - gave him a second vantage point. He'd been the customer. Now he was learning how the sausage got made on the vendor side. By the time he left, he had seen the same problem from both chairs.
The problem was always the same, no matter which company or which chair. SOC analysts were buried. Every tool in the stack fired off alerts, most of them false positives, and human beings were expected to sort the signal from the noise by hand, one redundant investigation after another. Real threats slipped past not because analysts were careless, but because they were exhausted and outnumbered.
Ben-Hador's read was blunt. Most security tools cover the easy alerts - the convenient fraction that automation already handles well. But the alerts that matter, the risky ones nobody has time to triage, tend to live in the other, uncovered majority. That gap is where breaches hide. Building a company around that single uncomfortable observation is a fairly honest thing to do.
"Security teams don't need more dashboards or more detections, they need answers they can trust."
Shahar Ben-Hador, CEO & Co-founderIn 2021 he co-founded Radiant Security with Barry Shteiman, who serves as CTO. Both had spent years as CISOs, researchers, and product builders, so the founding team wasn't guessing at the customer's pain - they'd lived it. Their pitch is an "adaptive AI SOC": software that triages, investigates, responds, and manages logs in one place, so a team can handle rising alert volume without hiring proportionally more people.
The framing Ben-Hador uses is deliberate. He doesn't describe a chatbot or a co-pilot bolted onto a dashboard. He describes an agentic AI that acts "with the precision of a top-tier analyst at any scale." The distinction is the whole product: automation should handle the noise so humans can focus on the mission-critical calls that still need judgment.
There's a case study he likes to tell: an attack aimed at a pharmaceutical company's executive team, caught and resolved within minutes. Alongside it he cites the numbers Radiant reports - a steep cut in false positives, mean-time-to-respond collapsing from days to minutes. Numbers from a vendor deserve a raised eyebrow, and these are the company's own. But the shape of the claim is consistent with the problem he spent twenty years watching.
Ask most founders for their favorite milestone and you'll hear about a funding round. In November 2023 Radiant closed a $15M Series A led by Next47, with investors including Lightspeed and Acrew Capital - money meant to expand engineering and go-to-market. It's a real signal. But it's not the one Ben-Hador reaches for first.
The moment he seems proudest of is quieter: customers who change jobs and then bring Radiant with them to the new employer. It's a loyalty test money can't fake. If someone re-buys your product on their own initiative, at a company you've never sold to, you've built something that actually earned its place. For a founder who came up through the analyst's chair, that's the review that counts.
"AI should empower SOC teams, freeing them to focus on mission-critical challenges while automation handles the noise."
Shahar Ben-HadorPeople who describe his leadership style land on the same few words: fast decisions, simple processes, informal but results-driven. He'd rather move quickly and let his team innovate than wrap everything in ceremony. The company itself runs across three time zones and continents - the SF Bay Area, Tel Aviv, and São Paulo - which puts real weight on keeping things simple.
His advice to people coming up sounds almost old-fashioned in a startup world obsessed with growth hacks: work hard, skip the shortcuts, and be willing to say out loud when something failed. Coming from someone who climbed from IT admin to CISO to CEO without skipping a rung, it reads less like a slogan and more like a description of what actually worked.
Radiant is a bet that the security operations center can be rebuilt around trust instead of dashboards - that analysts deserve answers they can verify, not more alerts to drown in. Whether the whole industry agrees is still an open question. But it's hard to argue that the person making the case hasn't earned the right to make it.