Cylake is a company founded by industry veterans to build a complete, AI-native, data-driven security platform for highly regulated organizations that require total data sovereignty, operating entirely on-premises or within private clouds. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Cylake founder and CEO Nir Zuk to learn more. Nir Zuk’s Background Could you tell me more about your background? Zuk said: “I started my career when I was a teenager. I developed some of the first computer viruses of the world, and that somehow landed me a job with Israeli intelligence for five years. When I left the service, I joined a tiny Israeli startup, Check Point Software, which created the cyber security market as we know it today, and where I built the first firewall. From there, I founded OneSecure in the U.S. – the first intrusion prevention system (IPS) company, which was later acquired by NetScreen and then Juniper. In 2005, I left Juniper and founded Palo Alto Networks, which today is by far the largest cybersecurity vendor in the world. Last August, after 20 years, I left Palo Alto Networks and started Cylake in early 2026.” Formation Of The Company How did the idea for the company come together? Zuk shared: “The idea for Cylake came out of years of conversations with companies looking to secure their businesses. I was speaking to customers and colleagues in the industry and noticed that a lot of organizations felt left behind by the cybersecurity industry, who, starting with Palo Alto Networks, all moved to be delivered from the cloud. And it turns out that there are quite a few organizations out there that can’t consume cybersecurity services from the cloud, either because they are running in air-gapped environments, so they aren’t even connected to the internet, or because of regulatory reasons. In other words,