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Yair Attar spent years leading nation-state incident response in the IDF before co-founding OTORIO an OT cybersecurity company built for the physical world: factories, critical infrastructure, industrial systems, and the environments where a cyberattack can shut down real operations.
Then came two major exits in rapid succession.
OTORIO was acquired by Armis. Not long after, Armis itself was acquired by ServiceNow.
But this conversation isn’t about headline-chasing or founder mythology. It’s about what building an “early” category actually feels like when customers don’t fully believe in the problem yet, budgets haven’t formed, and your market education costs more than your product development.
Yair breaks down the decisions and tradeoffs behind the growth:
• Why their early funding strategy looked more like a long-term operating plan than a traditional seed round
• What makes selling into industrial and OT environments uniquely difficult
• How being “too early” can quietly kill otherwise good companies
• Why competition can validate a market faster than your marketing ever will
• The shift that took them from “interesting technology” to win rates above 80%
• What buyers and boards really debate during acquisition conversations
• And what changes after the deal closes, when you suddenly have to integrate into a larger platform while still building
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation is Yair’s view on AI. His argument is that capability isn’t the bottleneck anymore — adoption is. Most companies aren’t struggling because the technology can’t do enough. They’re struggling because organizations, workflows, incentives, and trust move slower than the models do.
This episode is for founders, operators, investors, and anyone building in markets where timing matters almost as much as product quality.
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