In 2007, Assaf Rappaport was 24 years old and working inside Unit 81, an elite technology division of the Israeli Defense Forces that builds hardware and surveillance tools. For weeks, a friend had repeatedly badgered him about a 19-year-old soldier he was serving alongside, named Yevgeny Dibrov, insisting Rappaport needed to meet him.“He kept telling me, this guy is being wasted there, you need to talk to him,” Rappaport told Fortune.Before the two ever spoke, the friend told Rappaport that Dibrov had once won second place in a regional bout of Chidon Tanach, Israel’s national Bible trivia championship—a contest that requires memorizing scripture well enough to answer detailed trivia questions. Dibrov, who was not religious, entered purely to win. “I said, oh my God, this guy can probably do everything,” Rappaport recalled thinking.
Soon after, the two men spoke on the phone, one of them a teenager, the other already a rising figure inside Israeli military intelligence. They talked about Dibrov’s work, his dreams and aspirations, and whether he was in the right military unit. “By the end of that conversation, I knew I wanted him to be part of my unit,” Rappaport said. It wasn’t until Dibrov joined Rappaport’s command that the two men met face-to-face.
Rappaport became Dibrov’s commanding officer. “He would come in the morning with TheMarker, basically Israel’s Wall Street Journal, and we had terrific discussions and fighting about things unrelated to intelligence and computer science and cyber, but talking about business,” he said.
Avishag Shaar-YashuvIn April 2026, ServiceNow paid $7.75 billion cash for Dibrov’s company, Armis, a platform that monitors every connected device on an enterprise network—medical equipment, industrial systems, or other “internet of things” devices—and then flags the ones that pose a security risk.
It was the largest acquisition in ServiceNow’s history and the second-biggest pure startup exit in Israeli tech ever. (By coincidence, Rappaport holds the top spot with Google’s $32 billion acquisition in 2025 of Wiz, a cloud cybersecurity company.)
Dibrov, 38, and his co-founder, Nadir Izrael, split roughly $930 million between them in the exit. Dibrov became general manager of the newly formed Armis business unit inside ServiceNow, with Izrael as group vice president of product and engineering. The two are running roughly the same operation they built a decade ago, just bolted onto a company with a $180 billion market cap and thousands of enterprise customers.
When news of the Armis deal first leaked to Bloomberg in mid-December, ServiceNow’s stock opened down 9% that Monday. The market reaction mirrored a then-new fear gripping software stock investors: that AI agents would make traditional enterprise software obsolete. By spring, Wall Street had coined the term “SaaSpocalypse.” ServiceNow fell, down as much as 42% in the first four months of 2026, worse than Salesforce over the same stretch.
Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s chief product officer, doesn’t buy the SaaS doomsday premise. “We did not really believe in this SaaS apocalypse,” he told Fortune, noting that the company was hitting or beating its own financial targets every quarter through the scare.
Rather than treat the moment as a threat, Zavery said ServiceNow saw it as an opening. The acquisition of Armis allowed ServiceNow to fold cybersecurity, IT asset management, and industrial device monitoring into a single platform. “That’s where our thinking was, and that’s how we’re seeing the traction play out very well. Our thesis was accurate, as you can see,” he said.
In May, ServiceNow shares surged 41%, its best performance since going public in 2012. The stock jumped another 8% in late July after second-quarter earnings beat estimates, outrunning Salesforce and Workday in the same rally. Revenue hit $3.99 billion, up 24%, and the company said its AI products had crossed $1 billion in annual contract value.
Asked whether the acquisition helped ServiceNow avoid the worst of the SaaSpocalypse, Zavery didn’t hedge. “It is helping, for sure,” he said, though he was careful to note it’s one piece of a broader strategy, not the whole story. ServiceNow gave Armis and its sister acquisition, Veza, direct credit, folding both into a new unit called Autonomous Security and Risk, and telling investors the combination is “supercharging” its security business.
Inbar GoldWhen Dibrov visited New York City in May, he confessed at the West 42nd Street Lifetime Fitness indoor basketball court that he originally planned on playing professionally. “I wasn’t tall enough,” he said, lobbing a three-pointer at the net while dressed in a skin-tight Armani suit. Dibrov is six feet tall, but the way he coifs up his silver-spackled dark hair into a fauxhawk gives him at least a couple of extra inches.
Dibrov was three years old when his family left Ukraine for Israel, part of a wave of post-Soviet-Jewish immigration in the early 1990s. What he remembers vividly about his upbringing is growing up in a household that, for years, couldn’t afford a car, while every other family around him had one. “It always pissed me off,” he told Fortune last May, sitting across from Jeff Horing, the managing director of Insight Partners who made the largest bet of his career on Dibrov. “Even right now, when I’m thinking about it, I don’t care how much I’ve made; I’m going to work harder and continue.”
He now owns several Italian sports cars and is an avid automobile enthusiast. On the basketball court, he complained about the workaday aesthetics of Ferrari’s first electric car before reminding himself that “humility is my most important value.”
They financed each other’s fortunes twice over
Dibrov studied electrical engineering and computer science at Technion, Israel’s top technical university.
In 2012, Rappaport called Dibrov, who was still finishing his degree, and told him he was starting a cybersecurity company. He wanted Dibrov, then 24, to be the first hire. “I’ll study on Saturday, maybe a bit on Sunday, and all the other time I’ll just work,” Dibrov recalled telling Rappaport. That company, Adallom, protected corporate data stored in cloud software by watching how employees behaved inside a company’s cloud apps and flagging anything out of character, the same instinct for spotting what doesn’t belong that would later define Armis. Dibrov ran Adallom’s business development across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, despite having no formal sales training. Microsoft bought the company in 2015 for $250 million.
Avishag Shaar-YashuvWhen Dibrov left Microsoft to start his own company in December 2015, he asked Rappaport for one thing: the right to be Rappaport’s first investor in his next venture. Rappaport agreed on the condition that the arrangement run both ways. Rappaport wrote Dibrov a $100,000 first check for Armis. Years later, when Rappaport co-founded Wiz, Dibrov gave him the same sum for his first check there too. The two men effectively financed each other’s fortunes, twice over.
The company’s first raise in January 2016 was typical of the early, scrappy years of Israel’s tech startup scene. He worked conference floors to find investors, catching executives as they walked off stage to pitch them. He and Izrael didn’t even have a term sheet when they took their first round. “It was $5 million at an $11 million post valuation. Today people would laugh at that,” Dibrov said.
Derek Zanutto, a partner at CapitalG, still remembers the moment he decided he needed in at Armis. He and Dibrov had met for barely an hour in Palo Alto, right after Armis closed a then-undisclosed round. Dibrov politely told him that Armis no longer needed the money. Zanutto left the room, made his way to the parking lot, only to turn around and walk back into the building. “Is there any possible way I could put any money in?,” he recalled asking. “Even a tiny amount, just to start a relationship with you.”
Eventually, Insight Partners acquired Armis in 2020 for roughly $1.1 billion dollars, with $100 million from CapitalG and a rollover from several existing shareholders. The cyber firm, however, continued to operate independently and be managed by Dibrov and Izrael. When ServiceNow bought the company, Insight’s stake was worth around $3.3 billion, representing 43% of the stock, according to TheMarker.
The IPO is cancelled
Armis kept growing in the following years until the company was doing more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue. By August 2025, Dibrov was openly telling employees it was headed toward an IPO. Then, that winter, the plan changed abruptly.
Dibrov recalls he got an out-of-the-blue call from Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president and chief product officer, pitching a speculative acquisition while he was on his way to the airport.
Zavery, who led the acquisition for ServiceNow, told Fortune he’d been following Armis for years. ServiceNow was working on building its own asset-tracking tools before deciding it made more sense to buy the market leader than keep building a competitor from scratch. “As AI becomes prevalent and core to every company’s transformation, the biggest problem customers are facing is security and governance,” Zavery said. “We saw a great opportunity.”
Inbar GoldJohn Aisen, senior vice president of product management, security, and risk at ServiceNow, sees it differently. He described the moment he was sold on Armis: On a marathon diligence call, Izrael mentioned a product called Vipr, a highly advanced product that finds security holes in code before hackers can do so. It wasn’t advertised on Armis’ website and, at that point, nobody at ServiceNow knew it existed. To Aisen, that meant Armis was building a range of sophisticated cyber capabilities built to address the industry’s evolving needs. “I’ve been in cyber, directly and indirectly, for 26 years,” he said. “Not only is that product proof, but these two folks, Yevgeny and Nadir, are folks that, one, I’ll have fun building a company with, and two, will add tremendous value to the authentic conversations we need to have with CISOs. That just took me over the edge.”
What Aisen keeps coming back to, though, is a story from earlier in Armis’ existence when Dibrov once got a Dear John letter from a departing customer who he learned was less satisfied with the product than expected and wanted to end the relationship. Instead of sending an account executive to smooth things over, Dibrov booked a red-eye flight himself, showed up in person, and talked the customer back into the relationship by coming up with a plan to resolve any technical issues. “That also sets a very good example for the people who work under you,” Aisen told Fortune. “I’m also willing to do the work that you’re doing, I’m not above you, and if I’m willing to do the work, then you’d better do the work too.”
During the 24 hours Dibrov spent with Fortune in May, he consumed at least five espresso shots while he darted across Manhattan to meetings and even attended Izrael’s religious wedding ceremony to his now-wife via Zoom from the back seat of a Suburban.
At home, his wife, Sharin Fisher, describes a man who always opens the car door for her, calls their toddler “the princess,” and whose voice audibly softens the moment the subject changes to his child. Yet he still closed a funding round from the labor and delivery ward the day after his daughter was born, laptop balanced on his knees, video call running in the hallway outside his wife’s hospital room.
Zanutto worries about exactly this. “He’s so hard-charging, puts in so much effort,” he said. “My advice to him has been, make sure you’re carving out time for yourself too, because you need that. He’s just a little too willing to make sacrifices in service of others.” He calls Dibrov “an unstoppable energizer bunny,” then adds, almost as a caveat, that in seven years he’s never once seen him well rested. “He always looks like he’s in the middle of going from one plane, one meeting, to the next, just charging ahead and fueling himself on shots of espresso,” he said.
Avishag Shaar-YashuvNegotiations with ServiceNow began even though some of Armis’ earliest employees had been implicitly promised an IPO payday. Dibrov had to explain, quickly, why the plan had changed. “I talked a lot about, one, that this is something customers really wanted,” he said. “It can be one plus one equals ten from every perspective.” He insists nobody pushed back. Investors, he says, got what amounted to the best internal rate of return of their careers, a fast, outsized payout. Some limited partners, he claims, hadn’t even finished wiring their most recent investment before the returns started coming back.
Morgan Stanley, who advised on the deal, also happened to be one of Armis’ biggest customers. Katherine Wetmur, the bank’s chief information officer of cyber, remembers meeting Dibrov roughly a decade ago at its first Tech Week conference. He was, in her words, “very eager” but “wasn’t ready for prime time yet.” What changed her mind over the following years was his persistence. “He probably at times might have wanted to give up on us, but he stuck with us,” she said.
Alonzo Ellis, Morgan Stanley’s global chief information security officer, said he was impressed that Armis built custom features around the bank’s regulatory needs on a two week turnaround instead of the usual months-long product cycle. “That really stood out,” Ellis said. “You rarely see that in companies.”
The new boss
Everyone in Dibrov’s orbit, though, described the same tension. Dibrov built his identity, and arguably a chunk of Israel’s tech industry’s self-image, on being the founder who doesn’t sell out cheap and doesn’t sit still. Now he answers to a corporate boss for only the second time in his life, working inside ServiceNow’s much larger, bureaucratic machine.
He’s openly uninterested in meshing with corporate culture. “I still act like a startup,” he said. “If there’s any roadblock, I go immediately to Amit and Bill. I don’t care, maybe somebody won’t like it. Well, we don’t have time.”
ServiceNow, however, isn’t a startup, and Dibrov no longer knows all of the names and faces that surround him. At the time of the acquisition, Armis had approximately 950 employees. Now Dibrov oversees 2,000 employees.
But for some—like Omri Casspi, the first Israeli NBA player who is now a venture investor—the acquisition is one step towards a much greater future. “I have no doubt in my mind that ServiceNow is going to try to make Yevgeny their CEO at some point,” he said.
Bill McDermott’s contract as Service Now’s chief executive doesn’t expire until at least 2030. So Casspi may be getting ahead of himself, and Dibrov has never indicated an interest in the role.
Zavery was careful to emphasize no such succession discussions were taking place. Nonetheless, “It’s been only four or five months, but I think all signs point that we made the right decision,” he said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Hence then, the article about inside the 8 billion cybersecurity acquisition that helped servicenow s stock buck the saaspocalypse fears was published today ( ) and is available on Fortune ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Inside the $8 billion cybersecurity acquisition that helped ServiceNow’s stock buck the ‘Saaspocalypse’ fears )
Also on site :
- ‘American Idol’ Alum Ruben Studdard Stuns Fans With Weight-Loss Transformation After Hitting 462 Pounds
- Ted Lasso's Lady Greyhounds Unpack Gemma's Head-Versus-Heart Dilemma, Lizzie's Life Beyond Motherhood, And What's Holding Boots Back
- Walmart’s Modern Boucle Counter Stools Are So ‘High-Quality,’ and They’re on Sale for Under $100 Right Now