Before the machines, there is coffee. Asked in 2021 how he sets up his day, Yaniv Vardi began with the beverage and moved quickly to a rule: choose three things that must get done. A chief executive’s calendar can turn into a collection of other people’s emergencies. His small defence against that is a list short enough to remember.
It is a useful entrance to a career spent in businesses where attention has to land somewhere specific. Vardi has worked with industrial software, energy monitoring, and now cybersecurity. The machinery is often out of sight. The decisions are rarely optional. A factory still has to run while its managers consider what a new technology might do for it.
Since July 2020, he has been chief executive of Claroty. Its work reaches into the connected systems behind production lines, power networks, and other physical operations. To understand how he arrived there, it helps to begin earlier, when the question was how to get machinery to disclose what it was doing.
The small orange clue
At Panoramic Power, where Vardi became CEO in 2012, the proposition involved wireless, self-powered sensors and cloud analytics. A machine’s electricity consumption could become a stream of information about the business using it. The equipment did not need to develop a conversational personality. It needed to make its behaviour legible.
A 2017 account of the technology described tiny orange sensors fitted to outgoing electrical wires at circuit breakers. They sent energy data to an analytics system every 15 seconds. That interval matters to the idea: a periodic bill tells you what a site consumed; readings from individual devices can help you ask what happened inside it.
The same account described sensors monitoring pumps, conveyors, and crushers for a building-materials business. Vardi’s explanation centred on equipment performance and the practical needs of plant managers. It is a revealing setting for an executive education. A quarry is an uncompromising audience for an abstract promise. The crusher has a job to finish.
In November 2015, Direct Energy, through parent company Centrica, announced an agreement to acquire Panoramic Power for $60 million. The purchase followed an existing commercial relationship. It placed a device-level monitoring business inside a larger energy group, taking Vardi’s work from a smaller technology company into an international operating environment.
announced in 2015
as chief executive
Eight countries, many conversations
At Centrica Business Solutions, Vardi’s international responsibilities covered eight countries, with activity across Europe, South America, and Asia-Pacific. That is a different sort of scale from the number of sensors on a production line. An international business has to coordinate people who may share a product but operate under different commercial conditions.
His earlier career had already crossed borders. He co-founded and led Sparta Systems’ European operation before joining Panoramic Power. He studied at New Jersey Institute of Technology, graduating magna cum laude with majors in Industrial and Management Engineering and Management of Information Systems. He also served five years in the Israeli Air Force.
Those details place him near the meeting point of systems and management. They do not make every later choice inevitable. They do help explain the experience Claroty was hiring: an executive accustomed to making industrial technology into a business, and a business into an organisation capable of operating in several markets.
Cybersecurity had appeared in his Centrica work before he took the Claroty role. In August 2018, Centrica announced an investment in industrial-security company Indegy, in partnership with Centrica Business Solutions. Vardi’s comments connected customers’ energy strategies with resilience against power-supply problems and cybercrime. The industrial-security question was already on his desk.
A change of chair, a familiar factory floor
Claroty announced Vardi’s appointment on July 20, 2020. He arrived after two quarters of company growth, with a brief to carry that expansion further. His own account two months later contained a useful admission: this was his first job on the industrial cybersecurity vendor side. Experience in an industry can travel without pretending every new assignment is familiar.
He began changing how the business reached customers. Regional general managers would lead the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Japan, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Claroty was also searching for a chief revenue officer. The structure aimed to give regional teams the resources and focus their geographies required.
The explanation was unusually direct about timing. A company could change while it was performing well. Waiting for difficulty would give the same organisational decisions an entirely different atmosphere. The thought has an everyday logic: a successful arrangement can still be too small for the next task. Success is a reason to examine it.
“smart companies make changes from a position of power”
Yaniv Vardi · September 2020
The work is less photogenic than a product launch. Someone has to redraw responsibility, appoint managers, and decide which choices belong close to the customer. Yet those decisions determine how far a product can travel. The company that invents something also needs an organisation that can explain it, deliver it, and remain useful afterwards.
The connection has two directions
The continuity between energy monitoring and industrial cybersecurity is easy to see. Connecting equipment makes its workings easier to understand. The connection also creates questions about access, exposure, and control. In 2021, Vardi described the problem facing industrial enterprises as previously isolated operational systems became more closely linked with information technology.
Claroty’s work includes visibility into connected assets, vulnerability and risk management, threat detection, and secure remote access. In ordinary terms, a business needs to know what it has, what might go wrong, and who can reach the equipment. These are practical concerns before they become procurement categories or acronyms on a slide.
A supplier can promise a better view of a network. An operator still has to decide what to do with that view. Which system needs attention? Who understands its role in production? Who is authorised to make a change? The questions bring industrial expertise into the security discussion. Knowing a device exists is the beginning of a conversation about its purpose.
Vardi has also argued for public and private organisations to cooperate on critical-infrastructure security, and for stronger requirements on technology suppliers. His concern reaches beyond the boundaries of one customer account. The businesses running infrastructure, the vendors supplying it, and the authorities setting expectations all have decisions to make.
“The race to connectivity far outpaces the ability to secure it.”
Yaniv Vardi · May 2024
Growth, with the dates attached
Claroty reported passing $100 million in annual recurring revenue during 2023. In March 2024, it announced $100 million in strategic growth financing and said its customer count had grown by more than 300 percent since 2020. These are company milestones during Vardi’s tenure. They describe the scale of the organisation around him.
In January 2026 came a $150 million Series F led by Golub Growth, with additional confirmed participation from existing investors of up to $50 million. Claroty said it was working with 24 Fortune 100 organisations. The funding was intended to support global expansion, including growth through acquisitions, and further development of its protection platform.
For Vardi, the next product conversation includes artificial intelligence. In a March 2026 leadership video, he discussed using AI to turn fragmented information about assets into useful insights and better decisions. The practical emphasis is familiar from his energy-monitoring years: collect information, understand it, then help somebody decide where to act.
The nouns have become more fashionable. The underlying obligation is stubbornly ordinary. Security teams need information they can use, in a setting where equipment has a real purpose. An impressive amount of data is still only an impressive amount of data until it changes what somebody can understand or do.
The customer gets a vote
Vardi’s account of leadership includes a book: David Thomson’s Blueprint to a Billion. In a 2023 interview, he said it changed his thinking about customer focus. He described getting energy and direction for products from meetings with customers. That puts a conversation outside the company alongside the planning that happens within it.
He also emphasised people, integrity, and the pursuit of excellence, and argued that a chief executive should share credit with the team. Such principles acquire substance in decisions about hiring and responsibility. Choosing a colleague means choosing somebody whose judgement will eventually operate beyond your immediate view. A growing organisation multiplies those moments.
Customer attention and shared credit belong together here. Both ask an executive to recognise knowledge held elsewhere: with the people running an industrial operation, or with the team developing and delivering its tools. The chief executive can set direction, but the details that make a service useful are distributed across many desks. Listening is part of the operating work, alongside the targets and plans.
Room for the long route home
Outside the executive biography, there is a vineyard. In 2020, Vardi discussed his involvement in making wine in Israel, including decisions about flavour, body, and composition. He also spoke about basketball and off-road biking, and a 30-kilometre trail from home towards the beach. These are pursuits with their own demands on time.
They give a little texture to a public life usually described through appointments and transactions. The bicycle route suggests a day measured in distance rather than meetings. Wine allows an altogether different timetable. Neither needs to be pressed into service as a management metaphor. Sometimes a person’s interests are interesting enough on their own.
The career, meanwhile, keeps returning to the physical world. Software serves an operation. Sensors make equipment visible. Security attends to the connections. Vardi’s working day may begin with three priorities, but the assignment stretches across machinery most of us rarely notice. Its continued operation is precisely what lets us get on with our own lists.