Career
Kramer, who has been called "the godfather of Israeli cybersecurity," is a serial high-tech investor and entrepreneur with "a long track record of success".[8] He founded his first startup during high school in the 1980s along with Ofer Shemtov, and the company was later sold to a software firm.[9] In 1993, he co-founded Check Point Software along with Gil Shwed and Marius Nacht;[10] the company introduced the first firewall to the commercial market[11] and went on to become "a world leader in protecting the information that flows round the Internet, and a flagship of Israel's high-tech industry".[12] Kramer left Check Point in 1998 and used the money from the sale of his stake to strike out on his own as an entrepreneur and investor in numerous startups.[3][13]
In 2002, Kramer founded his second startup, WebCohort, renamed Imperva in 2004, together with Mickey Boodaei and Amichai Shulman.[14][15] Imperva moved away from perimeter defenses such as firewalls and instead deployed its software to protect against hackers and business-data theft by identifying and preventing attacks before they find their way to the inside of an organization.[16]
The company's initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange raised $90 million, with its shares gaining 33% on its first day of trading on 9 November 2011.[17] In 2014, Imperva acquired Skyfence, a cloud security gateway startup in which Kramer was a lead investor, and bought the shares it did not already own in Incapsula, a cloud-based website performance and security service in which it had already invested.[18] The acquisitions helped Imperva extend its data security strategy throughout the cloud.[19]
Kramer's belief in the cloud as the next big development in cybersecurity[16] led him to establish Cato Networks in 2015, together with former Imperva colleague Gur Shatz.[20] Kramer acted as the Cato Network's CEO since its inception.[9] Cato Networks' software integrates all the elements of an organization's network – including branch locations, data centers, mobile users and more – into one encrypted network in the cloud. This means the enterprise is no longer tied to an array of location-bound appliances to protect its data.
