Vol. XIII / Cybersecurity / Person of Note
Tomer
Weingarten
He told the Israeli cyber establishment thanks, but no. Then he built a public company that sells to the people who used to ignore his calls.
He told the Israeli cyber establishment thanks, but no. Then he built a public company that sells to the people who used to ignore his calls.
How a Petah Tikva kid ended up running a Gartner-leading platform out of Castro Street
The first thing to know about Tomer Weingarten is that the man he runs SentinelOne with - Almog Cohen - has been his friend since second grade. They met over a computer in suburban Petah Tikva, never really stopped talking about software, and roughly two and a half decades later they walked their company onto the New York Stock Exchange. Most founder origin stories are reverse-engineered. His is not.
The second thing to know is that he did all of it from the outside. No Unit 8200. No tight Tel Aviv venture circle. No friendly board seat passed down. When Weingarten and his co-founders went looking for money in Israel, they were politely shown the door. They flew to the Valley with a deck and a thesis: signature-based antivirus was a museum piece, and a single autonomous agent on the endpoint could do what a whole industry of dashboards could not. The thesis held. The cap table filled. The agent got smarter.
Today SentinelOne is a Mountain View public company that crossed a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, a six-time Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for endpoint protection, and the home of Purple AI - an agentic security analyst that, by its own Q4 FY26 numbers, was attached to more than half of new licenses sold. Weingarten is its chairman, its president, its CEO, and, by all accounts, still the person in the room asking the most stubbornly technical questions.
“We are not part of the Israeli cyber clique, which is our strength.” - Tomer Weingarten to Calcalist
From a polling startup to an agentic SOC
Engineer first. Marketer when necessary.
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