ZEST founders CEO Ben Shimol and CTO Uri Aronovici
ZEST Security is an Israeli cybersecurity startup offering an AI-powered cloud risk resolution platform to eliminate enterprise cloud security risks at scale exited stealth this week with a seed round investment of $5 million from Hanaco Ventures, Silvertech Ventures and angel investors. The firm says that its platform “correlates and pinpoints the root cause of cloud risks to craft resolution paths that eliminate cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that attackers can exploit.”
A cloud risk resolution platform is a specialized tool designed to streamline the process of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating cloud security vulnerabilities. By automating many of the manual tasks involved in risk management, these platforms significantly reduce the time and resources required to protect cloud environments.
Founded in 2023 by two former Israeli military intelligence officers CEO Ben Shimol and CTO Uri Aronovici, ZEST Security offers an AI-powered risk resolution platform that redefines cloud risk remediation for security and DevOps teams. ZEST resolution paths provide both mitigation and remediation using code and existing controls to eliminate cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
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Before founding ZEST, Snir built the global cyber security platform and services organization at Varonis. Shimol then held the role of CSO at Cider Security to build the first AppSec OS. Snir and the co-founders took Cider from $0 ARR to an impressive exit to Palo Alto Networks in just two years.
Uri Aronovici has 10+ years of hands-on and leadership experience in cloud and product security working at large organizations including Akamai Technologies and Check Point Software. As the security architect lead, Uri faced the challenges associated with remediating cloud security risks daily. Bombarded with alerts from his cloud security stack, he spent years going back and forth with DevOps teams to find solutions. Despite his efforts, there was little to show for it in terms of actually reducing the risk to the business. These frustrations led him to develop a technical solution, which eventually became the vision for ZEST.
Modern security stacks excel at identifying cloud risks, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations, but struggle to effectively address them. Remediation is a manual, time-consuming process often hindered by complex workflows and knowledge silos. Resolving a single cloud security risk can take up to two months, with 80% of issues recurring shortly after mitigation. This inefficient approach not only incurs significant operational costs but also exacerbates the risk of successful cyberattacks.
“In recent years, the focus has been on cloud risk identification, but what we now have is a ‘failure to remediate’ problem,” said CEO Ben Shimol. “We founded ZEST to solve a big challenge within a new market. By providing security teams with resolution paths –whether that’s mitigation using existing tools, or preventative remediation using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)–organizations can finally level the playing field with threat actors. Just three years ago, building a product like this wouldn’t have been possible. We have a unique opportunity to tackle this now by taking advantage of developments in GenAI and the rapid adoption of DevOps systems.”
