Apex Security

Two officers from Unit 8200

Apex was founded in 2023 by Matan Derman, the CEO, and Tomer Avni, the chief product officer. The two met during their service in Unit 8200, where Derman was a lieutenant colonel and Avni a captain, and both hold master's degrees from Stanford and Harvard. According to Derman, while founding the company they spoke with dozens of senior executives and found that many of them were avoiding adopting advanced AI because of security concerns. The company was built on that gap, between the wish to use the tools and the fear of them.

The product: seeing and enforcing AI use

Apex built a platform that gives an organization a full picture of its AI activity: which tools are used, who uses them and with what data. Based on that picture, the organization sets rules, such as which tools are allowed and what may be entered into them, and the platform enforces them. It detects deviations from the company's or the industry's security standards, and responds to attacks on AI systems. The stated goal: to allow use of the tools without data leaks, without injection of malicious data and without privacy or legal violations. According to the company, by May 2024 it was already serving customers from the Fortune 500 list.

Out of stealth, with notable investors

In May 2024 Apex came out of stealth with a $7 million seed round, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. The private investors included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. According to CTech, the company's total funding up to the acquisition was $8.6 million, a very small amount for a company sold a year later.

The acquisition: two numbers

On 29 May 2025 Calcalist reported that Tenable, an American security company, was acquiring Apex for more than $105 million. It was Tenable's sixth acquisition in Israel. Tenable's quarterly report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission gives a different number: the acquisition of 100% of the company's shares was completed in June 2025, for total consideration of $47.8 million, almost all of it in cash. The sources do not explain the gap between the amount reported in the media and the consideration in the report. It is a reminder that it is worth distinguishing between a "reported amount" and what the acquiring company records in its financial statements.

Inside Tenable

Tenable is best known for Nessus, a widely used vulnerability scanner, and is building a platform around it for managing organizations' exposure to cyber risk. In January 2026 it launched Tenable One AI Exposure, a product that detects when employees use AI tools that have not been approved, a phenomenon known as Shadow AI, and enforces usage policy. According to Dark Reading, Tenable built the Apex platform into it, with deeper detection at first for Microsoft's Copilot and for ChatGPT. Apex thus joined a wave of young Israeli AI security companies acquired by large cyber companies, such as Prompt Security and Aim Security.