Airgap Networks was a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company that built an agentless Zero Trust segmentation platform to stop ransomware and lateral threat movement across enterprise IT, IoT, and OT networks. Using a patented DHCP-proxy architecture, it placed every device in a 'network of one' (a /32 segment) without agents, APIs, or infrastructure upgrades, and shipped an industry-first Ransomware Kill Switch. Founded in 2019 by Ritesh Agrawal and Satish Mohan, the company raised $18.6M before being acquired by Zscaler in April 2024 to extend Zscaler's Zero Trust SASE platform with firewall-free, east-west segmentation.
Ritesh Agrawal is a network-security engineer turned founder who co-founded Airgap Networks in 2019 to attack the problem most enterprises ignore: lateral movement once an attacker is already inside the building. His bet was that you do not trust any device, period. Zscaler acquired Airgap in April 2024, and its agentless, identity-based microsegmentation became the foundation of Zscaler's Zero Trust Branch, which Ritesh now leads as VP of Product Management. Before founding the company he spent nearly 18 years at Juniper Networks across engineering, product, and sales.
Illumio is a Sunnyvale-based cybersecurity company that pioneered Zero Trust Segmentation. Its Breach Containment Platform - Illumio Segmentation plus the AI-powered Illumio Insights - assumes attackers will get in and focuses on stopping them from spreading. By mapping how applications talk to each other across data centers, public clouds, and endpoints, Illumio lets organizations isolate workloads and contain ransomware and breaches before they become disasters.
Andrew Rubin is the CEO and co-founder of Illumio, the company that pioneered Zero Trust Segmentation - the idea that once a breach happens (and it will), you stop it from spreading. A Brooklyn native who built his career through sales, he founded Illumio in 2013 and scaled it to a $2.75B valuation with $225M in Series F funding, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, General Catalyst, and investors including Marc Benioff and John W. Thompson. Named to Goldman Sachs' '100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs' seven times, he earned EY Bay Area Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024 and remains one of cybersecurity's most vocal advocates for rethinking how organizations think about inevitable breaches.
Pandian Gnanaprakasam is the CEO and co-founder of ORDR, a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company specializing in IoT, OT, and IoMT security with $94M in funding. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in networking and security, he previously co-founded Aruba Networks — acquired by HPE for $3 billion in 2015 — and led engineering at Cisco's multi-billion-dollar Wi-Fi business. At ORDR, he returned as CEO in March 2025 to spearhead the evolution of the ORDR AI Protect platform, which provides agentless device discovery, AI-driven risk scoring, and automated zero-trust policy enforcement across millions of connected devices in healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure.
Ratan Tipirneni is President and CEO of Tigera, the company behind Project Calico - the open-source container networking and security project powering over 100 million containers across 8 million nodes in 166 countries. A serial entrepreneur with stints at Cisco, Actifio, Sun Microsystems, and SupportSoft, he joined Tigera in 2017 and has since grown it into the definitive platform for Kubernetes security, observability, and now AI workload protection.
Tigera is the creator of Calico, the open-source standard for Kubernetes networking and security that powers more than a million clusters every day. From its San Jose headquarters, the company sells Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise - SaaS and on-prem platforms that bolt active runtime security, zero-trust microsegmentation, and observability onto container environments at any scale.