Dani Golan

Founder and CEO Silk

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dani Golan is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Silk, which sells software-defined cloud storage designed as an acceleration layer for enterprise workloads. The problem it addresses is a specific and expensive one. Enterprises that move demanding databases into the public cloud find that cloud storage is built for elasticity rather than for sustained low-latency performance, and the usual remedy is to overprovision — buying far more capacity than is needed in order to secure the throughput that is. Silk inserts itself between the workload and the cloud, delivering real-time data access, consistent application performance and instant recovery without that overprovisioning. Golan describes it as a supercharger for the database world, and says the company virtualises the cloud rather than merely running on it. He is a repeat founder in enterprise storage, having co-founded the flash storage company Kaminario before leaving in 2018, and earlier ran Performix Technologies through its 2006 sale to NICE Systems after new-ventures work at EMC.

Career Highlights

• Founded Silk and leads it as Chief Executive Officer, building software-defined cloud storage as an acceleration layer for enterprise workloads.
• Raised a $55 million Series B on 7 July 2021, led by S Capital, taking total funding to $90 million.
• Drew a broad investor base — Sequoia Capital, Pitango, Globespan, Ibex and Vintage as existing backers, with Clal Insurance, Bank Hapoalim, Meitav Dash and Menora Mivtachim joining.
• Reopened that round three times because of demand, by his own account.
• Grew the company to around 200 people, roughly two-thirds in Israel, from a base in Yokneam.
• Won production customers including eToro and Payoneer, and US health systems reporting substantial cloud cost savings and analytics speedups.
• Co-founded Kaminario, an enterprise flash storage company, before leaving in 2018.
• Led Performix Technologies as President and General Manager through its 2006 acquisition by NICE Systems.

Professional Journey

Golan trained as an electrical engineer at the Technion and later took an MBA at Kellogg, a combination that maps onto a career spent on the commercial side of deep infrastructure products rather than in engineering management. His early executive work was at EMC, in new ventures — the part of a large storage company charged with finding the next business rather than running the current one — and then at Performix Technologies, where he was President and General Manager. NICE Systems acquired Performix in 2006.

He then co-founded Kaminario, which built enterprise flash storage arrays during the period when solid-state media was displacing spinning disk in the data centre. That business put him at the centre of a genuine architectural transition, and it is the company he is best known for within the Israeli storage industry. He left in 2018.

Silk is the successor effort, and its premise reflects what changed in the intervening decade. The performance problem no longer lives in the storage media; it lives in the gap between what a demanding database expects and what a public cloud provider’s storage service delivers. Cloud block storage is designed for elasticity and durability, and organisations that need predictable low latency for a transactional or analytical database routinely resort to buying far more provisioned capacity than they need in order to obtain the IOPS. Silk’s software-defined layer sits between the workload and the cloud, providing consistent performance and instant recovery while removing the need for that overprovisioning. The resulting pitch is unusual in that it is simultaneously a performance argument and a cost argument — and the customer evidence the company publishes is framed both ways, with Franciscan Health citing $2.8 million in annual cloud storage savings and Sentara Health citing analytics and ETL workflows running 32 times faster.

The commercial reception has been strong. A $55 million Series B closed on 7 July 2021, led by S Capital, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Pitango, Globespan, Ibex and Vintage joined by a notable group of Israeli institutional money — Clal Insurance, Bank Hapoalim, Meitav Dash and Menora Mivtachim — bringing total funding to $90 million. Golan has said the round had to be reopened three times to accommodate demand. Early flagship customers included the Israeli fintech unicorns eToro and Payoneer, both of which run workloads where database latency translates directly into user experience.

The company operates from Yokneam in northern Israel with around two hundred people, roughly two-thirds of them in Israel, and has built out a US commercial organisation alongside — a president, a chief business development officer and worldwide sales leadership based in the United States, with research and development concentrated in Israel.

Education

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

B.Sc., Electrical Engineering

Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

MBA