Saar Bitner

Co-Founder Firebolt

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Saar Bitner co-founded Firebolt in 2019 with Eldad Farkash, and served for several years as its chief operating officer. The two came out of Sisense, the business intelligence company where Farkash had been co-founder and chief technology officer and Bitner had been chief marketing officer and general manager for Israel — a pairing that gave the new company deep familiarity with what analytics customers actually complain about. Firebolt’s answer was a Postgres-compliant analytical database built for engineering teams rather than for analysts, competing on query speed and on the cost of running large analytical workloads in the cloud. The company came out of stealth in December 2020 with 37 million dollars and has raised 270 million dollars in total, operating from San Francisco, Munich, Tel Aviv and Bangalore. Both founders have since stepped back from executive roles; Firebolt’s leadership page now lists Bitner as Co-Founder, with Benjamin Wagner as chief executive.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Firebolt in 2019 with Eldad Farkash and served as its chief operating officer through the company’s launch and growth.
• Firebolt emerged from stealth in December 2020 with 37 million dollars in funding and has raised 270 million dollars in total.
• Helped build a company operating across four countries — San Francisco, Munich, Tel Aviv and Bangalore.
• Spent more than five years at Sisense as chief marketing officer and general manager for Israel, during a period of rapid growth for the company.
• More than a decade of senior marketing, sales and product management experience across analytics and big data businesses before founding Firebolt.

Professional Journey

Bitner’s career before Firebolt was built in the analytics market on the commercial rather than the engineering side. He held senior management roles across several technology companies and accumulated more than a decade of marketing, sales and product management experience, culminating in a period of over five years at Sisense — the Israeli business intelligence company — where he served as chief marketing officer and as general manager for Israel. Those are two quite different jobs held at once: the first outward-facing and global, the second a country leadership role with operational responsibility, and the combination is a reasonable explanation for why he became the operating half of a founding pair rather than the marketing half.

Firebolt was founded in 2019 with Eldad Farkash, who had been Sisense’s co-founder and chief technology officer and who became Firebolt’s chief executive. The thesis followed from what both had watched at Sisense: analytics tools kept getting better while the underlying data warehouses stayed slow and expensive, so that the binding constraint on what an analytics product could do was the database beneath it. Firebolt set out to rebuild that layer — a cloud data warehouse designed for speed on large analytical workloads, later positioned specifically as a Postgres-compliant analytical database for engineers, so that teams could adopt it without abandoning the interface they already knew.

The company emerged from stealth in December 2020 with 37 million dollars, and went on to raise 270 million dollars in total, building offices in San Francisco, Munich, Tel Aviv and Bangalore. Bitner was chief operating officer through that period, the role covering the operational machinery of a company scaling across four countries at once.

Firebolt’s shape has since changed considerably. Both founders stepped down from their management roles, and the company is now led by chief executive Benjamin Wagner, with Mosha Pasumansky as chief technology officer; Farkash moved to the role of co-founder and chairman. In 2025 Firebolt laid off dozens of employees in Israel and abroad, retaining a small development team in Israel alongside its US team, while holding more than 100 million dollars in cash — management’s stated reasoning being that AI-driven capability had reduced the need for a large engineering organisation. Bitner remains listed by the company as a co-founder. What involvement, if any, he retains beyond that is not stated in any public source, and no subsequent role elsewhere has been identified.

Education

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

B.Sc., Computer Science

Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

MBA

Both entries are carried forward from an earlier record and could not be independently corroborated during this review; no graduation years are available for either.