The Story of Anjuna: Building the Future of Confidential Computing

Some of the most transformative companies start with a simple realization: the status quo isn’t just inefficient – it’s fundamentally broken. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Anjuna CEO Ayal Yogev shared how this insight led to building a company that’s reshaping enterprise security.

From Intelligence to Innovation

The story begins with a 20-year friendship forged in Israel’s elite intelligence unit, 8200. While Ayal went on to build products at companies like Imperva and Cisco, his future co-founder Yan Michalevsky took a different path, pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford under renowned cryptographer Professor Dan Boneh. It was there that Yan encountered confidential computing – a breakthrough that would eventually bring the two former intelligence officers back together.

“He reached out to me, and I got super excited,” Ayal recalls. After 25 years in enterprise security, Ayal had seen a persistent pattern: “When you kind of peel the layers of the onion of 80% of security problems, you get to that same root cause, which is once somebody gets access to your infrastructure, it’s game over.”

The Leap of Faith

Starting Anjuna wasn’t just about seeing a technical opportunity – it required leaving a comfortable executive role with young children at home. “Starting company is definitely scary, and it’s definitely on the financial side. I was married, I had two very young kids when I was starting the company,” Ayal shares.

But like Jeff Bezos leaving Wall Street to start Amazon, Ayal was driven by a deeper motivation: “I don’t want to look back when I’m 60 or 65 and regret not doing this. So I think I would regret much more not doing this, looking back than if I did this and it failed miserably.”

Redefining Security

Rather than building another security tool, Anjuna aimed higher – to fundamentally change how enterprises approach infrastructure security. As Ayal explains, “Security is an enabler. If you build security the right way, then you can do things that you just couldn’t do before.”

This vision has resonated powerfully with enterprises. “We’re growing extremely fast. We’re about to quadrupling every year now,” Ayal notes. Even more remarkably, they’re “closing deals with very large banks within a six month cycle, which is extremely fast compared to how these banks tend to move.”

The VMware of Confidential Computing

Anjuna’s approach parallels another infrastructure revolution: virtualization. “VMware is a great example… I’m seeing a lot of similarities, kind of what we’re going through and what VMware went through in their early days,” Ayal observes. Just as VMware made virtualization accessible, Anjuna aims to do the same for confidential computing.

The Road Ahead

Looking to the future, Ayal’s vision is clear: make Anjuna the de facto standard for confidential computing. With “let’s say two years lead on the technology side,” the focus now is on market execution. The goal is ambitious but specific: “Anybody that wants to use confidential computing knows that Anjuna is the platform to go do that. That’s the best way to leverage this new category.”

By leveraging partnerships with major cloud providers and focusing on customer adoption, Anjuna is positioning itself to become the foundation of a new approach to enterprise security – one that doesn’t just manage risk, but enables entirely new possibilities.

For technical founders watching this story unfold, it offers a powerful lesson: sometimes the biggest opportunities come not from building better tools, but from fundamentally rethinking how enterprises solve their most critical challenges.