A wireless air fryer is an unusual thing to find on a corporate network. Yevgeny Dibrov says Armis encounters them. Cars turn up, too, along with more varieties of camera than a security team might care to imagine. The office has acquired a second population of connected things, and some of its residents arrived without introducing themselves.
Dibrov built a company around getting acquainted. In February 2025, he described talking to six or seven customers a day, keeping contact with established buyers as well as those still considering the product. The questions were practical: what did they need, what was changing, what should Armis do differently? A chief executive’s calendar can become a monument to internal meetings. His still had room for the people paying the bills.
By April 2026, ServiceNow had completed its acquisition of Armis, following a $7.75 billion agreement. Dibrov, the co-founder and longtime CEO, became its senior vice president and general manager of cybersecurity and risk. The transaction gave his career a new title. The habit behind it had been developing for years.
A question before a company
Armis began with Dibrov and Nadir Izrael working from the couch in Izrael’s apartment, calling security chiefs and IT managers. They wanted to know which tools were missing. The setting was modest; the question was expensive. Across businesses, more devices were connecting to networks, and the people responsible for security could not account for all of them.
Investors eventually came calling themselves. Insight Partners’ Teddie Wardi and Thomas Krane pursued the founders, arriving at the office for coffee before a planned financing decision. They offered introductions to potential customers, then started making them. Dibrov responded to the practical help. Insight joined the funding round and later acquired control of Armis in a January 2020 transaction valuing it at $1.1 billion.
“You can’t divorce your investors.”
Yevgeny Dibrov
His warning about choosing investors has the dry charm of advice usually delivered after a difficult wedding. For Dibrov, the useful test was what a partner could do when there was actual work to perform.
The work behind the opportunity
He was born in Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, in Ukraine. At four, he moved to Israel with his mother and an extended family that included grandparents and great-grandparents. He grew up in Rehovot. His mother had trained as an economist; in Israel, her jobs included picking citrus. His grandfather had been a gas engineer and became a gas station attendant.
Those changes in occupation carried a family’s investment in a child’s future. Dibrov later worked in a logistics factory to buy his first car. When he and Izrael wrote about their beginnings after the ServiceNow deal, they linked the company’s story to the possibility of social mobility. Their account kept returning to education, responsibility and the chance to build.
Competition had entered his life well before enterprise software. His grandfather followed him into table tennis and chess by becoming a referee. Books were regular presents from his mother. Dibrov read about chess openings with the intensity other children reserved for getting out of homework. He also played basketball and took up athletics.
The adult version of that intensity could be exhausting to contemplate. He saw selling as part of the CEO’s job and described a persistent fear of being overtaken. Yet he also valued adaptation: understanding the people and place in front of him. Growing up in Sha’arayim, a Rehovot neighborhood with a strong Yemenite community, had given him early practice in finding common ground.
An apprenticeship with customers
Dibrov served in the Israeli Intelligence Corps, studied computer engineering at the Technion and worked as a firmware engineer at Mellanox Technologies. At Adallom, the cloud security startup associated with Assaf Rappaport and the team that later built Wiz, he gained a different education. Business development meant taking technical ideas into unfamiliar rooms and finding out whether they survived the conversation.
He worked on demonstrations, customer trials and sales across regions. The range mattered. A product can function perfectly and still fail to answer the question a buyer is asking. Dibrov was learning both sides of that exchange, with little distance between the promise and the person expected to deliver it.
When Microsoft acquired Adallom in 2015, he chose to start something with Izrael. They had a relationship that predated the business, and Izrael brought experience from Google. Armis would need that combination of technical judgment and commercial curiosity. Neither discipline could supply the other’s answers by itself.
The sixth customer problem
There was an awkward moment early in Armis’s growth. The first five or six customers had bought in. Reaching the next thirty or forty proved harder. At a board meeting, a question surfaced: was the company selling the same thing its customers believed they were buying?
The answer required changes to the pitch and part of the product. Early buyers sometimes knew the founders or trusted their vision. That goodwill could disguise a misunderstanding of demand. A wider market was less obliging. It wanted the value explained in its own terms.
Dibrov later discussed the episode while mentoring Rapydo co-founder Matan Nataf through the Growth+ initiative. Nataf was struck that Dibrov still boarded planes and helped make sales even after Armis had hundreds of employees. The story offers a useful complication to the image of a founder who predicts everything correctly: he had to learn what he had misunderstood, then keep learning as the company expanded.
A map of everything else
In June 2017, when Armis publicly launched after roughly eighteen months of quiet development, Dibrov explained the problem through familiar objects: televisions, printers, headsets, phones, security cameras and building systems. Many could not run the security software installed on a conventional computer. They still connected to the same world.
His argument was rooted in use. Businesses wanted the efficiencies these devices offered. Security had to make that use possible. A company could own a connected object, depend on it and remain surprisingly vague about what it was doing. Armis sought to give the security team a clearer inventory and a continuing view of behavior.
- See the assetKnow what is connected.
- Understand the exposurePut risk in business context.
- Act on the findingPrioritize and coordinate a fix.
A simplified view of the work Dibrov describes.
By September 2023, he was presenting the company’s next phase around Armis Centrix. The scope had widened from discovering connected things to helping customers prioritize vulnerabilities and manage their response. Airports, ports, manufacturers and food distribution networks all depended on technology extending well beyond an employee’s laptop.
That expansion gave the founding question a longer life. Once a customer could see an asset, other questions followed: how exposed was it, how important was it, and who would deal with the problem? The product had to follow the customer further into the work. A better inventory was a beginning with consequences.
Acquisitions became one way to extend the answer. In March 2025, Armis acquired OTORIO, adding industrial security capabilities and support for different operating environments, including on-premise deployments. For Dibrov, the deal sat inside a longer company strategy. Industrial customers had systems that needed protection where they actually ran, with all the constraints that setting imposed.
An IPO on the calendar
There were personal milestones alongside the product changes. In June 2023, Dibrov won EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year Bay Area award. His response spread the credit to Izrael and the wider team. A founder may receive an individual trophy, but an enterprise product is delivered by a crowd.
A public listing had also been on the agenda for years. In 2023, Dibrov discussed preparing Armis for a possible IPO as early as the second half of 2024. He was describing readiness and options. As often happens in company-building, the calendar proved more negotiable than the ambition.
In November 2025, Armis announced a $435 million financing at a $6.1 billion valuation. Dibrov described plans to fund product development, acquisitions and expansion into more markets. He also set out revenue goals beyond $500 million in annual recurring revenue, with $1 billion further ahead. The company was still discussing a route to an IPO.
Nov ’25$435m funding round
Dec ’25$7.75bn deal announced
Apr ’26ServiceNow deal closed
The following month, ServiceNow announced its agreement to buy Armis. A plan for independence had become a plan for combination. The sequence makes a tidy financial timeline, though Dibrov’s explanation of the next chapter stayed close to the operating problem: helping customers move from discovering risk to doing something about it.
After the deal, the work
The acquisition closed on April 20, 2026. ServiceNow said Armis Centrix was already integrated with its platform and would continue to be available as a standalone solution, with deeper integration expected over time. Armis brought knowledge of connected assets; ServiceNow brought workflows through which organizations could coordinate action.
In his message marking the close, Dibrov returned to early customers and the trust they had placed in the company. He described the difficulty of having information about a threat without the connected processes needed to resolve it. That gap was now central to the work ahead. The new parent company offered a different scale at which to attempt it.
By September, he was discussing another complication: AI agents. Security teams needed to understand assets alongside the identities, permissions and access associated with them. Software that could take action introduced more questions about what it should be allowed to do. His emphasis was on reducing exposure and responding quickly, extending the old concern about visibility into an increasingly active software environment.
The air fryer is the amusing end of a serious problem. Businesses keep connecting things, and someone has to understand what has joined them. Dibrov’s career has grown around that responsibility, with the customer conversation still doing essential work. After the financing rounds, the trophies and the acquisition, there remains a question worth making time for: what have you found that we need to understand?