Gil Tene

CTO & Co-Founder Azul

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Gil Tene is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Azul, the Sunnyvale, California company that describes itself as the only company entirely focused on Java. Its runtimes, including Azul Core and the high-performance Azul Prime, are used by 37% of the Fortune 100 and the world’s ten largest banks. Tene has built Java technology products since 1995. He is best known for the technology that set Azul apart: the Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4), a garbage collector designed to remove the application pauses that have long been one of Java’s performance limits. He is also active in Java governance, representing Azul on the executive committee of the Java Community Process, and has been named a Java Champion. Since December 2025 Azul has been majority-owned by Thoma Bravo.

Career Highlights

• CTO and co-founder of Azul, which he started with Scott Sellers, now its President and CEO.
• Pioneered Azul’s C4 pauseless garbage collector, Java Virtualization, Elastic Memory and related managed runtime technologies.
• Represents Azul on the Java Community Process executive committee. He and Azul were named JCP Member/Participant of the Year at JavaOne in 2013.
• Named a Java Champion in December 2017 and one of Silicon.com’s Top 50 Agenda Setters in technology in 2006.
• At Check Point Software Technologies, delivered the industry’s first Firewall-1 based security appliance.
• Awarded more than 40 patents in computer-related technologies.

Professional Journey

Tene earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy’s Computer R&D unit. His early work was in systems software and networking. He architected operating systems at Stratus Computer and clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato. He then held senior technology positions at Check Point Software Technologies, where he delivered several traffic management products, including the industry’s first security appliance built on Firewall-1, and later at Shasta Networks and Nortel Networks.

He co-founded Azul Systems in 2002 with Scott Sellers and Shyam Pillalamarri. Azul began as a hardware company, selling Java compute appliances built to scale the computing resources available to Java applications. Around 2010 it moved to software-only products, and it later retired the appliances. Tene’s work on managed runtimes connects the two eras. The C4 collector, Java Virtualization and Elastic Memory technologies he pioneered went into Azul’s high-performance JVM, first sold as Zing and now as Azul Prime. The company also distributes Azul Core (formerly Zulu), a certified build of OpenJDK sold as a supported replacement for Oracle Java.

Outside Azul’s products, Tene has been one of the Java community’s most visible technologists. He is a frequent conference speaker and a JavaOne “RockStar”, and he represents Azul on the executive committee of the Java Community Process, which governs the Java specification. At JavaOne in 2013 he and Azul were named JCP Member/Participant of the Year, the award for the member with the greatest positive impact on the Java community that year. He was named a Java Champion in 2017.

Azul has remained private throughout. In April 2020 it closed a growth equity investment led by Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital. In November 2025 it agreed a majority strategic investment from Thoma Bravo, which closed on 3 December 2025, with Vitruvian and Lead Edge keeping significant minority stakes alongside Azul’s employees. Tene remains CTO and co-founder on the company’s leadership team.

Education

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

BSEE, Electrical Engineering