Pentera at $100M ARR – A CEO Reflection

Pentera has just crossed $100M in Annual Recurring Revenue, and I couldn’t be more proud.

When I joined forces with our Founder and CTO, Dr. Arik Liberzon, and stepped into the CEO role back in 2018, $100M ARR felt like a number reserved for big, mature companies. As a company in stealth who hadn’t gone to market yet, it wasn’t even a dream we allowed ourselves to have.

I vividly remember sitting at InfoSec London that year, listening to George Kurtz talk on stage about CrowdStrike crossing $100M ARR seven years after emerging from stealth. It sounded like a story from another planet. The big boys’ league.

Back then, Aviv Cohen (CMO), Ran Tamir (CPO), Arik and I weren’t optimizing for revenue milestones. We were focused on something more foundational: building a category.

We didn’t see ourselves as a BAS company. We weren’t agent-based or simulation-driven. We believed that we were creating a new category with a different name, Security Validation. But belief alone doesn’t move analysts, execution does. We were early to the market and too small to influence Gartner or the market as a whole, and we didn’t yet have the customer traction to back our conviction.

So we focused on building.

Between 2018 and 2019, our core team came together. We were joined by exceptional engineers, researchers, and operation team members to build the foundation for what Pentera would become. With the groundwork in place, we officially went to market in 2019.

What followed was an intense, humbling, exhilarating journey. Pentera became one of the fastest cybersecurity startups to reach $3M, $10M, $50M, and $75M in ARR. And today, we’re proud to be the first company in Gartner’s Adversarial Exposure Validation space to cross $100M ARR and become a Centaur.

Why does this milestone matter so much?

It feels like being the oldest brother in a family, something I happen to be in real life as well. There was no one ahead of us. No paved path. No prescription. We had to figure everything out ourselves.

We had to invent a UI/UX that non-pentesters could love and operate independently. We built in-app business logic that supports real-world work methods. We coined terms like “achievements” and “attractions”. We made hard calls about what belongs in the core platform and what becomes a new product, constantly balancing customer value with long-term business health.

We also had to build a platform that is safe by design, not as an afterthought, but as a core principle.

Our exceptional R&D organization had to, and still does, create, test, and re-test every new adversary capability before it reaches production, ensuring we leave nothing behind. Safety, containment, and responsibility were never optional. Other players in our market bluntly place full responsibility for any safety implications on their customers when running their platforms.
For us, this was never an option. From day one, responsibility has always remained firmly within Pentera’s boundaries.

We defined the DNA of our research, marketing, HR, and leadership teams. We built finance, legal, and people teams whose job is to serve employees and customers, not the other way around. Over time, we shaped the whole post-sales operation with the same mindset: professionals whose role is to serve and advise our customers around the globe.

Along the way, we raise funds to fuel the growth. Raising money matters, but fundraising is wildly overrated compared to the difficulty of building real, durable revenue.

Winning customers. Building culture. Scaling responsibly. It’s a 24/7 challenge, not for the faint-hearted. It demands courage, perseverance, creativity, and an almost unreasonable amount of hard work.

So why do so many people pour their hearts into Pentera?

It’s not the paycheck. That’s a commodity.

It’s the X-factor, the feeling that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. Bigger than your role or your team. That energy is contagious. And it’s the magic behind Pentera.

Building Something Real

We made the deliberate decision to validate security for real, not stop at pointing to critical assets and calling it a day.

We established an in-house research team to map real adversary attack paths instead of outsourcing the core intelligence of our platform to crowdsourcing.

We educated the channel ecosystem on a platform that “attacks customer infrastructure for real”. It wasn’t easy. We had to deeply understand what’s in it for partners and how customers truly benefit when the channel and Pentera experts work together.

We built a customer organization from scratch, Customer Success, Solutions Architects, and everything in between.

As a CEO deeply rooted in Go-To-Market and sales, I had to make decisions with no playbook. When does founder-led sales end and mainstream sales begin? Which markets do we enter and when? How do we design the 1-Day POV, which later became our trademark as it delivers immediate value on the spot?

Respect Competition

As the market for security validation matured, competition naturally followed. We embrace competition. It keeps us sharp and ultimately benefits customers, which is what matters most.

I’m proud to call the founders and CEOs of our early competitors friends on this journey. We meet, we talk, exchange perspectives and learn from one another. Some of those conversations still stay off the record.

We were amused and flattered to see many BAS vendors change their taglines and websites shortly after we did, adopting the “security validation” narrative.

Speaking with fellow founders and CEO’s from the industry, running category leading companies, I learned they experienced the same phenomenon. Being a market leader comes with responsibility and with a target on your back. I’ll take the burden of number one over the frustration of being number three or four any day.

Scaling, Culture, and People

We hired the best talent across the world and became a Unicorn in December 2021, just three years out of stealth.

Yet my biggest challenge as CEO has never been competition, product features, fundraising, or sales. It has always been connecting the pieces.

How do you build a vibrant, happy, high-performing culture at scale? How does a Solution Architect in Germany feel connected to a Support team rep in the US or Account Executive in Japan? What is Pentera culture when it’s an aggregation of dozens of local micro-cultures?

If there were a book, I’d read it. Since there isn’t, maybe I’ll write one someday.

The Right Partners at the Right Moments

From the beginning, Pentera benefited from partners who understood both the ambition of what we were building and the patience required to build it properly.

Yaron Ashkenazi and the AWZ Ventures team believed in us first, leading our seed round in 2018, before customers or market validation.

Blackstone becoming both a customer and investor in Series A changed our trajectory in the Americas. Adam Fletcher, Blackstone’s Global CISO back then, became one of Pentera’s strongest allies from day one, opening doors to trust circles we never imagined.

Receiving the Insight Partners term sheet in 2020, in the middle of COVID, felt like being admitted to Harvard. We were oversubscribed, but choosing Insight Partners was easy. Thomas Krane, Philine Huzing, and the team had a proven eye for category leaders. They believed in us leading the Security Validation revolution, and today, that revolution is real.

Christian Grant and K1 Investment Management, together with Richard Seewald and Evolution Equity Partners, were incredible partners as we scaled globally and elevated our Go-To-Market execution.

Gratitude

This milestone is a moment to thank our customers and partners, some have been with us for over seven years. There is no Pentera without you.

Technology is always about trade-offs. What matters is learning, improving, and showing up every day. As the CEO, I remain deeply committed to delivering exceptional onboarding, product experience, and customer excellence, 24/7, around the globe.

And above all, there are our people.

I couldn’t be prouder of the 450 Penterians across 20 countries who keep pushing, building, and winning.

2025 was a year of accelerated growth and acquisitions.
2026 will be a year of technology breakthroughs and strategic alliances.

Stay tuned. We’re cooking something special.

First to invent Automated Security Validation in 2019.
First to $1B valuation in 2021.
First to $100M ARR in 2025.

$200M, here we come.