The Story of Onyxia: Building the Future of Security Performance Management

Sometimes the most valuable startups emerge from the intersection of deep domain expertise and widespread industry pain points. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Onyxia founder Sivan Tehila shared how her decade of experience as a cybersecurity officer in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) led her to identify and solve a critical challenge in enterprise security management.

From Military Intelligence to Enterprise Innovation

Sivan’s journey began in the IDF, where she served as “the CISO of the research and analysis division and the head of the information security unit for the intelligence court.” This role provided unique insights into the challenges of managing complex security operations, particularly the need to balance security with operational effectiveness.

The military experience taught her valuable lessons about resilience and problem-solving: “I remember myself many times waking up in the middle of the night when I got a phone call that something is happening and you just need to act and you need to act fast,” Sivan recalls. This experience fostered a mindset that would prove crucial in entrepreneurship: “Everything can be solved and it’s just a matter of strategy, focus and thinking a few steps ahead.”

Discovering the Enterprise Pain Point

After retiring from the IDF in 2015, Sivan worked with various defense industries and critical infrastructures in Israel, including building the security operations center for Israel Railways. Her move to the United States brought her to Perimeter 81 (recently acquired by Checkpoint), where she gained experience in building products from scratch.

But it was her direct experience as a CISO and interactions with other security leaders that revealed a surprising reality: “Almost any Fortune 500 CISO I spoke with showed me an Excel sheet that they’re managing since they started their position as a CISO in any company.” This manual approach to security program management in major enterprises signaled a significant opportunity.

Building Against the Grain

When Sivan started Onyxia, she faced skepticism because security performance management wasn’t an established category. “When I started, no one was talking about security performance at all,” she notes. Rather than conforming to existing categories, she chose to focus on solving the core problem.

This approach extended to their relationship with industry analysts: “We don’t want to build a product that is aligned necessarily with what Gartner’s defined category. We want to solve a problem,” Sivan explains. This commitment to problem-solving over category conformity has helped drive the company’s innovation.

The Vision for the Future

Looking ahead, Sivan envisions Onyxia becoming the central nervous system for security leaders. “My dream was to be able to wake up in the morning, like I’m asking Alexa ‘how’s the weather today?’ To be able to go to one place and ask ‘what are the top three things I should be afraid of today?'”

The goal is ambitious but focused: “Were talking about performance, or performance management, but the way I see Onyxia is really becoming a platform that combines different solutions for security leaders to manage all their security efforts in one place.” This vision extends to being “the first platform CISOs are opening in the morning,” providing both high-level insights and detailed operational capabilities.

This combination of deep industry expertise, clear problem identification, and ambitious vision exemplifies how category-creating companies often emerge not from trying to create a category, but from solving real, widespread problems in ways that challenge conventional approaches. For B2B founders, Onyxia’s story demonstrates that sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in automating processes that have remained stubbornly manual, even in the largest enterprises.