Shai Onn

Co-Founder & President Akeyless Security

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Shai Onn is a co-founder and the president of Akeyless Security, which he started in 2019 in Ramat Gan with Oded Hareven, its chief executive, and Refael Angel, its chief technology officer. The company solves a problem created by cloud infrastructure: modern systems are made of services that must constantly prove their identity to one another, and the credentials they use to do so — API keys, certificates, tokens, passwords — proliferate faster than any organisation can track. Akeyless centralises and issues them, using its own Distributed Fragments Cryptography, which splits key material so that no single party, including Akeyless itself, ever holds a complete key. The company has since repositioned around the identity problem more broadly, describing itself as a runtime identity security platform covering AI agents, machines and people. Onn is a serial entrepreneur and a ProFounder at the cybersecurity venture firm Team8, and before Akeyless ran CA Technologies’ Israel business and served as an executive vice president at Ness Technologies.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and president of Akeyless Security, founded 2019, headquartered in Ramat Gan with an office in New York.
• Raised a $65 million Series B led by NGP Capital, announced 16 November 2022, with Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners participating and total funding reaching $80 million.
• Brought Mike Christenson — previously president and chief operating officer of New Relic and of CA Technologies — onto the board as part of that round.
• Describes himself, as does Team8, as founder and chairman of Fireglass, the Israeli browser-isolation company Symantec agreed to acquire on 6 July 2017 in a deal reported at around $250 million.
• Israel country manager for CA Technologies and executive vice president at Ness Technologies earlier in his career.
• A ProFounder at Team8, the Israeli cybersecurity venture firm that co-founded and backed Akeyless.

Professional Journey

Onn’s career runs through the enterprise-software side of the Israeli technology industry rather than through its research labs. He was an executive vice president at Ness Technologies, the Israeli IT services group, and then Israel country manager for CA Technologies — a role that put him in charge of a large American software vendor’s presence in a market full of companies that would go on to compete with it.

His own biography, and Team8’s, describe him next as founder and chairman of Fireglass, the browser-isolation company that ran web sessions in a remote container so that nothing executable ever reached the user’s machine. Symantec announced its agreement to acquire Fireglass on 6 July 2017, in a deal Israeli press reported at about $250 million. It is worth recording precisely what the public record says: Symantec’s announcement quotes Guy Guzner as founder and chief executive, and independent coverage describes Fireglass as founded in 2014 by Guzner and Dan Amiga, with backing from Lightspeed and Norwest. Onn is not named in that coverage. The founder-and-chairman description comes from him and from organisations he is affiliated with, and is reported here on that basis.

In 2019 he co-founded Akeyless with Oded Hareven and Refael Angel, under the Team8 umbrella, where he is a ProFounder. The premise was that secrets management had been built for a world of static infrastructure and human operators, and that ephemeral cloud workloads needed something else — a service that could issue and rotate credentials at machine speed without concentrating trust in the vendor. Distributed Fragments Cryptography was the answer to the trust half of that problem: key material is never assembled in one place, so a compromise of Akeyless does not yield customer secrets.

The company raised a $14 million Series A and then, in November 2022, a $65 million Series B led by NGP Capital with Team8 Capital and JVP, taking total funding to $80 million. At that point Akeyless had around eighty people, split between R&D in Tel Aviv and go-to-market in the United States, and planned to double. Mike Christenson joined the board as part of the round — a notable hire for Onn given his own CA Technologies history, since Christenson had been president and COO there.

Akeyless has since broadened well past secrets. Its current positioning covers machine identity, human identity, certificate lifecycle management and multi-cloud key management, with AI agent identity at the front — the argument being that an autonomous agent acting on an enterprise’s behalf is just another non-human identity that has to be issued, scoped and revoked. Deutsche Bank now appears among its investors alongside JVP, Team8 and NGP Capital.

Education

Tel Aviv University

MBA

Bar-Ilan University

B.Sc., Computer Science & Economics