For Sanaz Yashar, CEO of Israeli cybersecurity company Zafran Security, who immigrated from Tehran at the age of 17, the death of Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei last week marked a milestone. In addition to the assassination of the man that controlled the land of her birth, she saw, for the first time, a partnership between the US and Israel against Iran. "My joy was less related to the person himself, and more to the fact that a joint force was taking action against the axis, and not just talking about it," she says in a exclusive interview with "Globes." "It’s proof that there’s a new sheriff in town."
But as someone who knows Iran well from the inside - and was also the inspiration for the protagonist of the Israel TV series Tehran (and we'll get to that later) - Yashar immediately gets back to reality. "It is possible that an alternative leadership will develop there now, or a civil war will break out. But Iran will not be Syria. So, in my estimation, we won’t see a horrible civil war there. However, the current regime has not yet been knocked out, so I believe that someone from the current regime will take control, although I can't imagine who it could be. In the spirit of Purim, we hope that this leader will not be affiliated with the IRGC (Revolutionary Guard). .
"Time is an important element here. In the same way that you don’t cook rice in a microwave, Iranians compete over who cooks rice the slowest. So, I'm still optimistic about this revolution, but we’re not yet at the stage where the rice is almost ready," Yashar explains. "There is nationalism in Iran, which is not necessarily religious, one that sometimes finds it difficult to distinguish between good and evil, one that is reluctant to perceive external intervention as a good thing and mainly tries to avoid civil war at all costs. They took to the streets, but they also said: ‘Let's stop for a moment, because we don't understand what the day after will look like, who will rule and how to really change the government.
"Iranians don't know how to build democracy and it's hard for them to establish an alternative leadership from within. There are bad people there - there will always be a 15-year-old who points a gun at me or Revolutionary Guards who shoot at midday in a busy park, but most of the people are tolerant." She herself fled with her family to Israel after a bullet was fired at her in a central square in Tehran (at present, she prefers not to elaborate on the circumstances).
For the past four years, Yashar has headed Zafran, a startup with about 150 employees that specializes in detecting and mitigating software vulnerabilities that enable hackers to penetrate and damage organizations.
Fixes are done without human intervention, through AI agents. Due to this innovation, it has already raised $150 million, about half of it just last December. The company has an estimated valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It is backed by prominent investors like Doug Leone, general parter at Sequoia Capital who also serves as a director at Menlo Ventures, which is an investor in Anthropic, and at the CyberStarts Fund, among the first investors in Wiz.
There's something different about the way Yashar approaches cybersecurity, at least in terms of motivation. "I have to be in a profession where there are bad guys on the other side and I can beat them. I have always been who I am, with no apologies. In Iran, too, we did not hide the fact that we are Jews. We continued to be vocal even if it was stupid."
"Adrenaline rushed and breathing stopped"
Once upon a time in Tehran, there was a subversive Jewish girl who did not hold back on her criticism of senior government officials. In high school, she skipped two grades and was the only girl to compete in the chemistry Olympiad in Tehran. Due to this achievement, she also won a visit to the nuclear reactor in Iran.
Today she lives in New York, but everything in that city reminds her of her hometown. The streets of Manhattan remind her of the center of Tehran, and the neighborhood where she lives reminds her of her childhood neighborhood where the elite of Iranian society lived. Even the spontaneous demonstrations of Iranian expatriates, which until recently were on every corner, reminded her of childhood friends from home. "Everything I see here takes me back, but I can't call it longing. I grew up there and it's part of who I am, but I haven’t yet settled the score with Iran."
At the age of 17, she immigrated to Israel where she began studies in biology and chemistry in the IDF Academic Officers Program, but the language barrier made it difficult. "I knew Arabic and English, but only letters in Hebrew." She then worked as a research assistant at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she met several students who had served in Unit 8200 and recommended her to their commanders.
"Some people showed up at the university, took me to a base somewhere, and showed me on the computer how they penetrate someone else’s computer. I remember the adrenaline rush and my breath stopping, when I realized I was seeing a familiar place. I didn't know anything about hacking, I didn't have internet until I was 17, and I asked, ‘Can he hear us from his computer?’"
She immediately enlisted in 8200, became an officer, was appointed commander of a secret cybersecurity team, and served in the unit for 15 years with several medals of excellence and countless intelligence achievements that she will never be able to speak about. This activity also served as the basis for the character of Tamar Rabinyan in the series Tehran, played by Niv Sultan.
How are you similar and how are you different from her?
"Sultan underwent training and in a short time learned Persian at a pace unlike anything - and it is one of the most difficult languages in the world. This proves that she has high self-discipline and that she knows how to study well. Maybe we're similar in that way, even though I think she's even better than me. I also connected to the duality of the character, who has a conscience and values that sometimes interfere with the purpose for which he was sent. I see myself in it in all kinds of situations in which I had an internal struggle. Sometimes she decides to listen to her conscience and rebel against the system; those are slightly younger versions of me. Over time, I learned that it is possible to manage conflict in a way that is not necessarily rebellious or mischievous."
"The attackers tore us apart. It was chaos"
After three years of service, Yashar realized she needed her freedom. "It was one of the most difficult times of my life. I was exposed to very difficult things." She decided to take unpaid leave. The same day she left the unit, recruiters were already waiting for her in the base’s parking lot. She signed a contract with Israeli company Cybereason, founded by 8200 veterans, and the short taste of civilian life left her wanting more.
"I had just gotten out of the army and was earning a salary of NIS 37,000, even before bonuses. I was so thrilled, I said to my husband, ‘Let's take out a mortgage and buy an apartment.’ At the end of that year, I was supposed to go back to the army, but that's how my romance with the cybersecurity industry began." Yashar didn't go back. She later worked as a cybersecurity analyst at FireEye, and from there moved on to manage the European team at Mandiant, a cybersecurity company that was later acquired by Google. While at Mandiant, she was exposed to a brutal cyberattack on an Israeli hospital.
"The attackers literally tore us apart, there was chaos everywhere," she recalls. "I went to the hospital and saw doctors and staff just standing in front of black screens, not knowing what to do. That's when I realized the existing system wasn't working. There truly was no real system that knew how to prevent an attack through cyber vulnerabilities. People said to me: You're crazy. Mandiant is showering you with money and stocks. But I gave up everything and founded Zafran. A week or two after Google acquired Mandiant, I was already out."
When did you realize that you were going from being a cybersecurity-woman to a CEO, and what professional price did you pay for the transition?
"I'm still a cybersecurity-woman. I didn’t give up on anything. I'm a mother and a family woman, and I'm also a good cybersecurity woman and analyst, and I'm also a good CEO. I pay a price for my professionalism and the pursuit of what is right to do. I know I’m being followed and that they’re looking for me. More than once, I’ve come to a conference and seen people taking pictures of me, and it's clear they’re coming from the cyber forces I'm fighting against. I’m not being paranoid, it's how they operate. With every interview, like this one, I gain new 'fans.'"
"Obsessed with user numbers for the product"
These days, Yashar lives and works in the US, which makes her a bit of an odd duck. "I have a dream where I'm no different. While being different usually helps me in life, there are those who shy away from it. Yesterday I was the only Israeli at an entrepreneurs' dinner with basketball player Steph Curry, who is also invested in us. I sat next to people who came out of prestigious places like Columbia and Harvard, but what do they know about the pain of cyberattacks? They learn from research, but we Israelis have experienced it firsthand."
AI is transforming software. How does it affect you?
"We are in the midst of a real revolution. AI is making cyberattacks far more feasible. We're seeing financial and state attackers using many types of AI to increase the number of attacks. This will allow many more people to create a crazy amount of vulnerabilities that almost any of us can exploit. We already feel the damage: the outages that you see more and more often, the ones that take down the internet - more of those. The only thing I'm worried about is the fate of Israeli cyber, because AI could erode our competitive advantage in the world."
Last weekend, Claude launched a software that knows how to detect and fix cyber vulnerabilities. This has sent cybersecurity shares plunging, with some saying it makes startups that help locate code vulnerabilities - the field in which you operate - redundant.
"Claude Code is used primarily by developers rather than by IT security teams. It performs code crawls that help developers write better software. Our customers, by contrast, are cybersecurity professionals and analysts within organizations. Today, no AI solution fully manages this environment, largely because most existing infrastructures were not designed for the AI era. We help make this domain accessible to companies whose systems were built before AI - such as Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks - by enabling them to connect their sensitive data securely to AI-enabled infrastructures. Organizations that were not built for this era often struggle to integrate external AI agents into their systems."
Do you envision an eventual exit for Zafran? Would you follow in the footsteps of your colleagues at Wiz and Armis Security?
"We received several offers, including big ones, but none of them were large and significant enough. Things didn't work out, and I believe that an acquisition shouldn't be the end of the story, that there is also ‘better together’ - two that are worth much more than one. A sale isn’t the goal, but it can help greatly to distribute the product to many more businesses. In the end, I'm mainly obsessed with the number of users of my product. The fact that the first hospital which bought the product from us already has 94 users and all departments have access to the same information - as far as I'm concerned, that’s better than closing a $3 million deal."
Finally I ask Yashar if she would like to return to Iran when the regime changes. She prefers not to answer, but notes, "Not a day passes when I don't think about what can be done and what leadership needs to be built there."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 9, 2026.
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