Fear of losing data keeps countless enterprises from fully embracing the cloud. But what if that fear could be eliminated entirely? This question sparked the creation of Anjuna, a confidential computing platform that emerged from a 20-year friendship between two former intelligence officers.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Anjuna CEO Ayal Yogev revealed how a well-timed reconnection with an old colleague led to a fundamental rethinking of enterprise security.

The Intelligence Origins

Before Anjuna, Ayal spent 25 years deep in enterprise security trenches. “I started my career in unit 8200, which is the Israeli equivalent of the NSA,” he explains. From there, his journey took him through the ranks of several major security companies – Imperva during its pre-IPO phase, Lookout in mobile security, and eventually to Cisco, where he led the cloud security solution after their acquisition of OpenDNS.

The most valuable lesson from his military service? “Everything is possible,” Ayal shares. “If you want to achieve something, if you want something to get done, you just need to find a way to make it happen.”

The Stanford Catalyst

While Ayal was climbing the corporate security ladder, his former intelligence unit colleague, Jan Michalevsky, took a different path. Jan pursued a PhD at Stanford under Professor Dan Boneh, one of the world’s leading cryptographers. It was during this academic pursuit that Jan encountered confidential computing and recognized its revolutionary potential.

The reconnection between these two former intelligence officers would prove pivotal. When Jan reached out to share his discoveries, Ayal’s extensive security experience allowed him to immediately grasp the implications.

The Moment of Recognition

After decades in security, Ayal had identified a persistent problem: “When you kind of peel the layers of the onion of, you know, 80% of security problems, you get to that same root cause, which is once somebody gets access to your infrastructure, it’s game over. They just have access to everything that you do.”

What excited him about confidential computing was its potential to solve this fundamental issue. “Finally there was a solution to this problem,” Ayal recalls, “a solution that even if they do get root access, even if they get full access to your infrastructure, they just can’t get any access to your data.”

The Leap of Faith

Despite having two young children and a stable career, Ayal made the decision to leave his VP of Product role at SafeBreach to co-found Anjuna. The decision wasn’t easy, but his reasoning echoed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s regret minimization framework.

“I always knew I wanted to start a company,” Ayal shares. “Someday I don’t want to look back, you know, when I’m 60 or 65, and regret not doing this… I think I would regret much more not doing this, looking back than if I did this and it failed miserably.”

The Market Education Challenge

Unlike typical security startups that can plug into existing budget lines, Anjuna faced a unique challenge: “Usually we walk in and there’s no budget allocated for confidential computing,” Ayal explains. This meant the company needed to create not just a product, but an entirely new category.

However, this challenge became an advantage. Rather than getting bogged down in typical security sales cycles, Anjuna’s solution started receiving board-level visibility because it enabled entirely new possibilities for enterprises, particularly in cloud adoption.

The Rapid Ascent

The market’s response has exceeded expectations. “We’re growing extremely fast. We’re about to quadrupling every year now,” Ayal reveals. Even more surprisingly, they’re closing deals with major banks in six-month cycles – lightning fast for financial institutions.

Looking Forward

Three years from now, Ayal sees Anjuna following in VMware’s footsteps. With a two-year technological lead and partnerships with AWS and Azure already in place, they’re positioning themselves to become “the default for confidential computing and anybody that wants to use confidential computing knows that Anjuna is the platform to go do that.”

For founders considering their own startup journey, Anjuna’s origin story offers several key lessons: the value of deep domain expertise, the importance of timing in market readiness, and most crucially, the power of solving fundamental problems rather than adding incremental improvements. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come not from building better walls, but from making the walls irrelevant altogether.