Check Point

An invention in Unit 8200: what "stateful inspection" is

The technical idea behind Check Point's first product was not born in the company itself but during Gil Shwed's military service in Unit 8200. Stateful inspection is a method that examines a data packet not only against preset rules (for example, "block all traffic from address X") but in relation to the full context of that network connection: is it part of a legitimate conversation that has already begun, or a new and suspicious attempt? This approach was more efficient and more accurate than the simpler filtering approaches that came before it, and Shwed patented it before founding the company together with Marius Nacht and Shlomo Kramer in 1993, with initial funding of about $250,000 from the Israeli fund BRM.

FireWall-1: the first invention, or the first commercial success?

Building on stateful inspection technology, Check Point created FireWall-1, which reached the market in 1994 and quickly became a flagship product that gave the company a dominant market share, about 40% of the global market according to IDC as early as 1996. It is important to be precise here, because this is a point of common confusion. Check Point is not "the inventor of the firewall" in the absolute sense. Earlier firewall prototypes already existed in the late 1980s in labs such as DEC and AT&T Bell Labs, and general articles on the history of firewalls (such as the corresponding Wikipedia entry) do not even mention Check Point. The more precise and better-documented claim, on which there is broad agreement, is that FireWall-1 was the first commercial firewall to achieve significant global success: a combination of strong technology with ease of use that suited the broad enterprise market, and not only research labs.

The IPO and the takeover of the firewall market

In June 1996, following its position as market leader, Check Point went public on Nasdaq under the ticker CHKP and raised about $67 million. The IPO was not the start of the story but outside confirmation of a success that already existed in the market. In the decades that followed, the company expanded its product line far beyond the original firewall: VPN products, endpoint security, and later CloudGuard for securing cloud environments. This growth made Check Point one of the oldest and most stable cybersecurity companies in the world, with an almost unbroken run of profitability since the IPO. That is relatively rare in the cybersecurity industry, which is usually made up of younger companies that have not yet reached profitability. Ruvi Kitov and Reuven Harrison, who worked at Check Point in development roles, later founded Tufin, which develops tools for managing the security policy of firewalls and networks.

Thirty years, and then a new CEO

Gil Shwed served as Check Point's CEO continuously from its founding in 1993 until December 2024, an unusually long tenure in the tech industry, and even more so in a public company. That month Shwed moved to the role of active chairman, and Nadav Zafrir, a former commander of Unit 8200 and co-founder of Team8, a group that founds and invests in cybersecurity and technology companies, was appointed CEO in his place. A change like this at the top of a large, long-established company is always considered a turning point, and Zafrir did present, on taking office, an agenda noticeably different from his predecessor's: a declared and rapid focus on AI as security infrastructure, and not just as a marketing add-on to existing products.

The partnership with Wiz: when former competitors become partners

In February 2025 Check Point announced a partnership with Wiz, the Israeli cloud security company that was later acquired by Google for $32 billion. Under the agreement, Check Point replaced its own in-house cloud security product, CloudGuard CNAPP, with Wiz's solution within the joint product bundle it offers its customers. The move is interesting because the two companies had previously operated in partly overlapping markets, and it shows a pattern that is spreading in the cybersecurity industry: established companies that prefer to partner with innovative startups over building a competing product from scratch, when the field is developing faster than in-house development can keep up with.

The next big move: a firewall for AI

Under Zafrir's leadership, Check Point accelerated a series of AI moves. In June 2026 it announced that it was integrating OpenAI cybersecurity capabilities into its products. In May 2026 it launched tools for "agentic exposure validation" that test whether autonomous AI models can exploit vulnerabilities in the corporate network. In July 2026 it unveiled a dedicated firewall meant to protect AI traffic itself, not just ordinary network traffic. According to Check Point Research's annual AI Security Report, published in July 2026, cyberattacks are gradually moving from a stage in which AI serves as an assistant to a human attacker to a stage in which it is the independent operator of an entire attack. This is the main argument the company presents as the justification for these products, although it is a threat forecast that the company itself publishes.