From Unit 8200 to Enterprise Security: Zenity’s Path to Creating a New Security Category

Military innovation units are often credited with breakthrough technologies, but their greatest value might lie in how they approach problem-solving itself. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ben Kliger revealed how his experience in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence unit, shaped Zenity’s approach to creating an entirely new security category.

The Military Mindset of Innovation

“That was one of my life changing moments,” Ben reflects on his time in Unit 8200. “What’s very unique about unit 8200 is that at very early stage, you get to do pretty amazing stuff and lead very important initiatives that has direct impact on our country’s national security.”

This early exposure to high-stakes innovation instilled two crucial principles that would later define Zenity’s approach:

1. Trust young people with critical systems
2. Challenge established thinking persistently

As Ben explains, “We embrace challenging our mindset continuously.” This principle became particularly valuable when identifying opportunities in enterprise security.

From Military Innovation to Market Opportunity

The journey from military intelligence to enterprise security wasn’t direct. Ben’s path included stops at Deloitte, Microsoft, and Fort Scale. At Microsoft, he witnessed firsthand how enterprise platforms were evolving: “I was there when I saw firsthand the big change of culture, of execution that you brought all across the organization with, of course, the two leading aspects of empathy towards our colleagues, towards our peers, towards our customer, and being customer obsessed.”

This experience, combined with his military training in questioning assumptions, led to a crucial insight: the future of enterprise development wouldn’t belong to professional developers.

Identifying the Category Gap

“Citizen Development today is a core strategy to make sure that organizations can really advance and continue to digitally transform their businesses,” Ben explains. “It’s about people building stuff on their own without waiting for it, or professional developers addressing their needs. It’s about using no code, drag and drop interfaces. It’s about using AI assistance or AI copilot to automate their processes.”

This trend created a security gap that existing solutions weren’t addressing: “How do you make sure that what these people are building were less tech savvy or of course less security savvy than traditional professional developers? How do you make sure that what they’re building is secure and is not exposing their respective organizations to risks?”

Creating the Category

Rather than trying to fit into existing security categories, Zenity created a new one. “I think it’s quite obvious that we’re creating a new category here,” Ben notes. “When we started Zenity almost three years ago, we started as the first company to target this world of cities and development. Then it was with local. Today it’s also with generative AI.”

This approach to category creation focused on:

1. Identifying future trends: “I think it’s important in the cybersecurity industry to also think about what’s coming next… actually seeing where your potential clients are going to be in a year time from now, in two years.”
2. Solving emerging problems: “Trying to find something really interesting to solve instead of going after similar problems that were already addressed in the past.”
3. Building analyst relationships: “Analysts are of course, very meaningful… It’s important to work closely with those respectful organizations such as Gartner and Forrester and IDC.”

The Power of Forward Thinking

For founders looking to create new categories, the key insight from Zenity’s journey is that category creation isn’t just about technology – it’s about identifying and enabling inevitable market transitions. Just as Unit 8200 empowers young innovators to challenge conventional thinking, successful category creation requires the courage to question established market assumptions and the vision to see where the market is heading.

This approach has positioned Zenity for significant impact. As Ben puts it, “We went to solve a problem that, first of all, huge. And with that, of course, there is a large opportunity to build something massive here, like a real company.”

For enterprise founders, particularly those from military innovation backgrounds, the lesson is clear: the same principles that drive military innovation – empowering people, challenging assumptions, and focusing on future threats – can be powerful tools for identifying and creating new market categories.