Ron Arbel began his journey in the cyber world in the Intelligence Corps’, where he served for 7 years until his release as a captain. Upon his release, he joined the founders of the Israeli cyber company Cyberillium and serves as its COO.
Cyberillium developed a product for analyzing and prioritizing risks in organizations that is installed in large companies, and has been providing research services to manufacturing companies and security agencies in Israel for two years. Arbel leads the company’s business collaborations, marketing and sales, and also manages the research unit which employs about 30 workers.
“After my release from the army, I founded the unit’s entrepreneurs forum”, he says. “I understood that there was a need among the graduates for a dedicated entrepreneurs forum for unit graduates, aimed at advising and guiding technological entrepreneurs. The forum currently includes hundreds of companies, including unicorns and large companies”.
In the forum, Arbel met Rubi Aronashvili, founder and CEO of the cyber company CYE. The acquaintance, Arbel says, eventually led to Aronashvili acquiring Cyberillium’s main product last year.
But the sale also brought new challenges. “After completing the deal, there was elation and a sense of success, but not everything glitters…”, he recounts. “The sale made the company’s vision – to become a profitable unicorn – less relevant, and this led to the departure of many employees. For me, it was a significant crisis, as within a few short weeks, talented people who had gone a long way with the company left. The path to a solution was developing a new product that dealt with AI-based vulnerability research, which helped to refill the ranks under a new vision and challenge that we offer to new employees”.
Personally, Arbel’s peak moment is actually related to the entrepreneurs forum he founded. “The fact that I founded a forum together with a partner that has an impact on hundreds of active entrepreneurs and thousands of potential entrepreneurs – fills me with pride”, he says.
With the outbreak of the war, he returned to reserve duty in aCyber Defense unit. “Both within the company framework and within the entrepreneurs forum framework, we performed volunteer work for security bodies that helped deal with the disorder at the beginning of the war, we established a group of cyber researchers in the company who helped security bodies and filled offensive and defensive cyber missions”.
But Arbel sees his future actually far from the cyber worlds. “The current war has changed the perception regarding elected officials in Israel and we want to see different leadership. Not just ‘elected officials’ from the old generation, but also those who have proven capabilities and success in the business market, in high-tech or in civil society”, he says. “My aspiration is to fill an influential public role that has the potential to contribute from my abilities and from the experience I will yet acquire for the benefit of Israeli society. To be more precise, I would like to be in a public role where I can lead a reform or research in the field of incurable diseases”.
