Shiri Gil

Most resumes climb. Shiri Gil's loops. She was leading teams inside Israeli Military Intelligence - running analysis, steering IT project work - at an age when many of her future Columbia classmates were still picking a major. The credentials came after the responsibility, not before it. That is an unusual order of operations, and it shows up in how she works.

Today she sits in the Office of the CEO at Vega, the security-analytics company headquartered between New York and Israel. The role has no tidy job description, which is the point. The Office of the CEO is the room where strategy meets logistics, where a founder's intent gets translated into something a 150-person company can actually execute. It is air-traffic control for a startup moving at altitude.

And Vega is moving. In February 2026 the company closed a $120 million Series B led by Accel, at a reported valuation near $800 million - just five months after a $65 million round. Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV came along. For the people running operations inside that kind of velocity, the job is less about adding fuel and more about keeping the thing pointed straight.

To understand the room Shiri Gil works in, understand the bet the company is making. For two decades, security teams have shoveled their logs into one giant central warehouse - a SIEM or a data lake - and then paid, painfully, to search it. Vega's founders, Shay Sandler and Eli Rozen, both veterans of Israel's 8200 cyber unit and Intel's Granulate, decided that model was broken.

Their answer is a "Security Analytics Mesh": a federated, AI-native layer that searches and detects threats directly against data wherever it already lives - cloud platforms, data lakes, SaaS tools, existing log stores - without forcing a costly migration first. The technical guts read like a graduate seminar in clever data structures: cuckoo filters, bloom filters, HyperLogLog, inverted indexes, finite state transducers, distributed query planning. The promise is plain. Analyze in place. Stop paying twice for your own data.

The market noticed quickly. Vega emerged from stealth in late 2025 and, despite being barely a year old, reported signing multi-million-dollar contracts with global banks, healthcare organizations, and Fortune 200 companies. That is the kind of early traction that turns an operations role from housekeeping into high-wire work.

Here is the detail that explains the rest: while building an operations career, Shiri Gil also pursued a dual degree in cognitive science at Columbia University, finishing in 2025. Cognitive science is the study of how people perceive, reason, and decide - the architecture of attention itself. It is a strange thing for an operator to study, and a perfect thing for one who came up reading intelligence.

Before Columbia there was Tel Aviv University, where she took a dual degree in psychology and digital culture and communication. Between and around those, a visiting research scholar stint in behavioral science at the University of Cambridge. Three institutions, three countries, one consistent theme: the mechanics of how humans process signal and noise.

That thread runs straight through her professional life too. At Deloitte she worked as a senior consultant in marketing technology, the discipline of aligning data infrastructure with strategy. Earlier she held marketing and operations roles and served as an Advance Program Manager at TLI - Triumph Leadership Innovation. Intelligence analysis, behavioral science, marketing technology, startup operations - on paper they look like four careers. In practice they are one skill applied four ways: find the pattern, then act on it before anyone else does.

In May 2025 she did something operators rarely do in public: she wrote about being uncertain. In a letter for Hillel International, Shiri Gil described arriving at Columbia as a former IDF soldier and an Israeli student, and how, after October 7, 2023, the campus felt heavier. "I needed to be surrounded by people who understood," she wrote, "people who had family in Israel." She found them through a Content Creators Forum, which she went on to co-chair, and through a Jewish Agency fellow named Yakov.

It is a small piece of writing and a revealing one. The same person who can run logistics for a fast-scaling company also knows that the hardest operations problem is usually belonging - and that you solve it by showing up, not by optimizing. That instinct, the willingness to be open about where you come from, tends to travel well into rooms where trust is the actual currency.

Cybersecurity is crowded with brilliant engineers and short on people who can hold an organization together while it sprints. Vega has the engineers - the 8200 alumni, the Granulate veterans, the probabilistic-data-structure crowd. What a company doing $120 million rounds in its second year needs just as badly is someone in the Office of the CEO who can read the room, read the data, and read the calendar all at once.

Shiri Gil has spent her whole career training for exactly that. She learned signal-from-noise in an intelligence unit, formalized it across three universities, and applied it inside a consultancy before bringing it to a startup that is trying to rewrite how security data gets searched. The pieces were always pointing here. Now they have arrived.