Udi Mokady & Alon N. Cohen: The CyberArk Co-Founders Who Built the Privileged-Access Category

Co-founders, CyberArk · Udi Mokady (long-tenured CEO) and Alon N. Cohen (founding CTO) · Founded the category of privileged-access management in 1999 and built one of the four institutional pillars of the Israeli cyber industry.

Udi Mokady and Alon N. Cohen co-founded CyberArk in 1999 in Petah Tikva. Over the next quarter-century, they built the company that defined the category of privileged-access management, took it public on Nasdaq in 2014 at a $700 million valuation, and grew it into a multi-billion-dollar market-cap identity-security operator. In May 2025, CyberArk agreed to be acquired by Palo Alto Networks for approximately $25 billion — the largest Israeli-founded cybersecurity M&A transaction after the Wiz–Google deal, and one of the largest identity-security transactions in industry history.

Background

Udi Mokady was born in Israel. His pre-CyberArk career was in Israeli technology sales and business development following IDF service. He holds a law degree from Boston University. He was 27 when he co-founded CyberArk and 42 when he took it public on Nasdaq.

Alon N. Cohen — the founding chief technologist — brought the technical thesis. The founding insight — that the highest-value target inside every enterprise's IT infrastructure was the small set of administrator accounts with privileged access to every system, and that securing those specific accounts required a purpose-built product category — was Cohen's contribution.

The founding and the privileged-access thesis

CyberArk was founded in 1999 in Petah Tikva. The founding thesis was that the emerging category of enterprise information security had a critical structural gap. The most valuable identities inside an enterprise IT stack were the small number of privileged accounts (system administrators, database administrators, service accounts) that held keys to the enterprise's most sensitive systems. That structural gap required a purpose-built product category. CyberArk built the reference implementation of that category — privileged-access management. The product concept — a hardened digital vault holding privileged-account credentials, with tightly controlled just-in-time access and comprehensive session recording — became the reference architecture that the PAM category standardized around.

The 2014 IPO and the multi-billion-dollar public trajectory

CyberArk went public on Nasdaq in September 2014 at $16 per share, opening trading at $23 for an approximately $700 million initial market capitalization. The company expanded from the pure PAM category into the broader identity security category — covering identity governance, cloud-privilege management, secrets management, and machine-identity — through both organic development and targeted acquisitions (Idaptive in 2020, Venafi in 2024). Market capitalization grew from the $700M initial listing to approximately $13 billion at its 2024 peak.

Mokady's near-two-decade CEO tenure

Mokady's continuous tenure as CEO from CyberArk's 1999 founding through 2023 — nearly 24 years — is one of the longest-running operating tenures at any Israeli public technology company. Among Israeli-founded companies, only Gil Shwed's 30-year Check Point tenure exceeds it. In April 2023 Mokady transitioned to executive chairman, with Matt Cohen (previously CyberArk's COO) taking the CEO role.

The 2025 Palo Alto Networks agreement

In May 2025, Palo Alto Networks and CyberArk announced an agreement under which Palo Alto would acquire CyberArk for approximately $25 billion in cash and stock. The transaction, the second-largest Israeli-founded cybersecurity M&A after the Wiz–Google agreement, positioned CyberArk's identity-security assets inside Palo Alto's broader Next-Generation Security Platform. Palo Alto's platform play — combining network security, cloud security, and now identity security under a single vendor — is a bet that enterprises will consolidate security spending onto fewer strategic platform vendors.

Where the founding cohort sits

The Israeli cyber industry now anchors on four institutional pillars at multi-billion-dollar scale: Check Point (Shwed / Nacht / Kramer), Palo Alto Networks (Zuk's US-based operation with substantial Israeli engineering), CyberArk (Mokady / Cohen), and now Wiz (Rappaport / Luttwak / Costica / Reznik) after the Google acquisition. The four cohorts collectively represent the institutional depth that has made Israel one of the two or three most concentrated national cybersecurity industries in the world.

Why Mokady and Cohen matter

The Israeli cyber industry's institutional depth is a function of the number of companies that have taken the full path from Israeli founding through category-defining product through public listing through multi-year public-company tenure through strategic transaction at institutional scale. That path is not the most common outcome; most Israeli cyber companies exit earlier via M&A. CyberArk is one of the few that ran the full path. Mokady and Cohen were the two founders inside it for the entire quarter-century.

Sources

CyberArk Software company disclosures, SEC filings, and annual reports (2014–2024). Palo Alto Networks M&A announcements (May 2025). CyberArk IPO prospectus (September 2014). Reporting in Calcalist, Globes, Haaretz, and The Marker on CyberArk's commercial trajectory. Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, and industry press coverage of the Palo Alto agreement.

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