Pentera Appoints Yael Ben Arie as Chief Product Officer to Lead Next Phase of AI-powered Exposure Validation

Erez Yalon is appointed as VP Cybersecurity Technology, as Pentera scales its leadership team to accelerate the company’s AI-powered exposure validation strategy

BOSTON, July 7, 2026 – Pentera, the Exposure Validation Company, appointed Yael Ben Arie as Chief Product Officer. The move follows the recent addition of Erez Yalon as VP Cybersecurity Technology, marking a deliberate expansion of Pentera’s Tech leadership bench as the company scales its platform and drives forward the next chapter of the agentic security validation.

“Yael and Erez are joining at a pivotal point in our growth,” said Amitai Ratzon, CEO of Pentera. “We’ve built something special: a strong product foundation, a bold vision, an exceptional team, and solid leadership. The market ahead is massive. Yael’s product leadership and Erez’s research depth strengthen our ability to keep leading the AI-powered security validation category.”

Yael joins Pentera’s senior leadership team to own product strategy and the continued evolution of the platform as the market shifts toward AI-driven continuous validation, evidence-based decisions, and measurable resilience. She brings more than two decades of experience across product, R&D, and business leadership. Most recently she was General Manager of Data Fabric at Cloudera, following Cloudera’s acquisition of Octopai, where she was CEO. Earlier, she was General Manager and VP of R&D at SafeBreach, helping establish the breach and attack simulation (BAS) category, and led teams at Trusteer (IBM Security).

“AI is rewriting the rules of cybersecurity, raising the speed, scale, and sophistication of both enterprise SecOps and attacker behavior,” said Yael Ben Arie, Chief Product Officer at Pentera. “That is what drew me to Pentera: the opportunity to help security teams move beyond assumptions and periodic testing with continuous evidence of their real-world cyber resilience. Pentera has the technology, products, talent, culture, and customer base to make security validation a must-have capability for every large organization.”

Erez brings 15 years in cybersecurity, much of it spent shaping where the field goes next. Over more than a decade at Checkmarx, he founded and led Checkmarx Zero, the company’s global research division spanning application and software supply chain security, and he co-authored the OWASP API Security Top 10, a standard now used across the industry. He also founded AppSec Village at DEF CON, one of the world’s largest application security communities. At Pentera, Erez serves as an evangelist for the company’s security research, collaborating with peers, partners, and industry forums to reinforce Pentera’s leadership in the market.