Yossi Torati left yeshiva at 17, taught himself English and computers, became an outstanding IDF officer and is now CEO of A Security, an Israeli AI cyber startup backed by leading Wiz investors“The need to investigate and take things apart has been with me since childhood, and it still is,” Yossi Torati says. “I used to take apart electronic devices and put them back together. But at 17, I also took apart the foundations I had grown up on.”Years later, he says, he watched the film “Gravity,” in which an astronaut, played by Sandra Bullock, is tethered to a spacecraft by a cable. When the cable suddenly snaps, she is left floating in space, disconnected from everything. “That was exactly the feeling I experienced,” he says.5 View gallery Yossi Torati (Photo: Yuval Chen)That feeling, of being between worlds, has never quite left him. In a few weeks, Torati, 38, will pack up with his wife, Aiden, and their 3-year-old son and move to New York, where he will build the sales headquarters for A Security, the company he leads as CEO. “There’s no way around it,” he says. “If we want to build a strong company that can properly serve the American market, we have to do it there from the beginning. The development, of course, will stay here.”A Security, the cyber startup which Torati co-founded with two partners, is only about a year and a half old. Until roughly three weeks ago, it was still considered one of Israeli high-tech’s best-kept secrets, as much as a company can remain secret while employing 80 top-tier talents in one of the country’s most central locations: a beautiful Templar building in Tel Aviv’s Sarona complex.5 View gallery "The need to investigate and take things apart has been with me since childhood". Yossi Torati(Photo: Yuval Chen)The company might have been remembered, or forgotten, as one more name among the roughly 500 cyber companies operating in Israel. Then it announced a $37 million seed round backed by major funds and entrepreneurs, including Wiz-linked investors: Cyberstarts, led by Gili Raanan and Hila Zigman, Lightspeed, and Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport himself. It was an unusual vote of confidence in a startup taking its first steps. Torati, too, could have been mistaken for another Israeli cyber CEO, if not for how far he is from the industry’s usual profile. He did not graduate from an elite science-track high school, did not serve in Israel’s famed 8200 military intelligence tech units and does not have an academic degree.He was born in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, the son of Haredi immigrants from Iran, grew up in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Malachi and studied at a prestigious yeshiva in Bnei Brak. He later left the Haredi world, having never studied core curriculum subjects (such as English, math or science), and has no academic degree. For many of his peers in Israel’s high-tech startup scene, that would come as a surprise. Like his secretive company, A Security, his story is being told here for the first time.A Security focuses on one of the threats now unsettling the cyber world: preventing AI-powered attacks. The concern is not theoretical: last week, the U.S. administration moved to suspend two powerful new AI models developed by Anthropic. AI is giving cyber attackers capabilities once reserved for nation-states and well-funded intelligence agencies, and it is doing so at breathtaking speed, even as much of the world remains unprepared for the shift.“We are on the defense side,” Torati says. “We give defenders the same AI capabilities the attackers have. Through those capabilities, we find all the ways attackers can enter an organization, move inside it, reach their target and carry out what they came to do, and we make it possible to block them. “The goal is not just to ‘find vulnerabilities.’ That is an old practice, and it is no longer relevant to the new era. The issue is full attack paths, from entry into the organization to the execution of the objective.”A Security’s advantage is that it was born into the AI era rather than forced to adapt to it. Unlike older cyber firms now trying to retrain workforces and rebuild products around AI, the company was designed around the problem from day one. It is already active and generating millions in revenue, with clients including the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and U.S. software company PTC.5 View gallery Torati as a yeshiva student. “I was curious and began to understand that things were more complex”(Photo: Courtesy)Torati was born in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. His father fled Shiraz in 1982, three years after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, crossing through mountain passes near the Turkish border. In Israel, he was ordained as a rabbi and entered yeshiva life. He later married Torati’s mother, who also came from a traditional Iranian family and had dreamed of marrying a kollel student. She worked, and still works, as a teacher. “At some point we moved to the Ramot neighborhood in Jerusalem, and later to Kiryat Malachi in the south,” Torati says.The family lived modestly. “As modestly as possible,” he says. “Four children, a three-room apartment, no car. But we did not feel poor.” In Kiryat Malachi, he studied at a Shas Talmud Torah in the religious-Haredi moshav of Yesodot. After eighth grade, his father wanted him to continue in a strong Sephardic yeshiva, and Torati was sent to Tiferet Moshe in Bnei Brak, a respected institution known for its rigorous, Lithuanian-style approach to Talmud study.Given what I already know about your abilities, you were not exactly an average student.