Dor Sarig & Ziv Karliner: The Pillar Security Co-Founders Building the GenAI Security Layer

Co-founders, Pillar Security · Building the security layer that sits inside every enterprise GenAI application · One of the earliest Israeli-founded companies purpose-built for the AI-application-security category.

Dor Sarig and Ziv Karliner co-founded Pillar Security in 2023 with a founding thesis oriented specifically to the emerging generative-AI application security category. Where Cyera operates on the data-security layer and Lasso Security operates on the runtime-firewall layer, Pillar operates on the application-security layer — the visibility, control, and risk-management infrastructure that enterprises need to deploy generative-AI applications inside their production environments. Pillar is one of the earliest Israeli-founded companies purpose-built for the AI-application-security category, and one of the operators most-cited by enterprise security teams as they assess how to secure the generative-AI applications now moving from pilot to production.

Background

Both founders come out of the Israeli cybersecurity technical pipeline that has produced most of the founding cohorts across the Israeli cyber industry. Sarig's pre-Pillar career sits in the cyber-adjacent product and go-to-market layer; Karliner's pre-Pillar career sits in adversarial-security research, the specific technical background most directly applicable to the generative-AI security category. The founding-team structure is the classic Israeli cyber pattern of paired-founder CEO/CTO leadership at the top of a small, senior technical team.

The AI-application-security thesis

The founding insight was that generative-AI applications deployed inside enterprises introduce a class of security exposure that legacy cybersecurity tooling was not designed to address. A generative-AI application is nondeterministic — each user prompt produces a new output that has not been reviewed in advance. The output is conditioned on the model's training data, on retrieval-augmented context, and on the prompt itself — each of which represents a potential channel for adversarial manipulation, data exfiltration, or policy violation. Traditional application-security tools (SAST, DAST, WAF) were built for deterministic applications and do not have coverage for the nondeterministic threat surface that generative-AI applications introduce.

Pillar's product architecture addresses that gap through discovery, monitoring, and control primitives specific to generative-AI applications. The product discovers where generative-AI applications are deployed across the enterprise, provides continuous visibility into their behavior at inference time, monitors for prompt-injection and other adversarial patterns, and enforces enterprise policy on model inputs and outputs. The category standard the product is competing to define is the AI-application-security-posture-management (AI-SPM) category adjacent to the DSPM category that Cyera pioneered.

Where Pillar sits in the Israeli AI-security wave

The Israeli AI-security wave now consists of roughly a dozen credibly funded operators, of which Pillar is one of the earliest and most category-focused. Adjacent operators include Cyera on the data layer, Lasso Security on the runtime-firewall layer, Prompt Security on the prompt-monitoring layer, Adaptive Shield (acquired by CrowdStrike in November 2024 for approximately $300M) on the SaaS-adjacent identity layer, and additional companies covering related slices.

The cohort's collective bet is that generative-AI application security is a durable, budgeted, category-defining enterprise security spend line — not a temporary segment of the broader cyber industry. If that bet holds, the cohort will consolidate around 2–3 category leaders that each command multi-billion-dollar valuations. If it does not — if generative-AI application security consolidates into the incumbent platform vendors (Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Microsoft) rather than remaining a standalone category — the cohort will exit into those platforms at more modest but still substantial valuations.

Watch points

• The next capital round or strategic transaction — Series growth-stage financing or early strategic-buyer interest.
• Category clarification — whether AI-application security (AI-SPM) crystallizes as a durable standalone category or consolidates into adjacent categories.
• Foundation-model vendor partnerships — Pillar's positioning inside the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google enterprise-partner ecosystems.
• Regulatory-driven demand — enforcement of EU AI Act obligations on high-risk AI systems as a durable demand driver for AI-application-security infrastructure.
• Consolidation dynamics — whether Cyera or an incumbent platform vendor acquires Pillar as part of AI-security category consolidation.

Why Dor and Ziv matter

The generative-AI application security category is new. Its market boundaries are still being drawn, its incumbent competitors are still being defined, and its category-leading operators are still being sorted. Pillar Security is one of the earliest Israeli-founded companies purpose-built for the category and one of the operators most likely to determine what the category looks like at maturity. Sarig and Karliner are the two founders inside it.

Sources

Pillar Security company disclosures on funding rounds and product releases. Reporting in Calcalist, Globes, Haaretz, and The Marker on Pillar's commercial trajectory. Industry press coverage of the Israeli AI-security wave. AI-security category analysis in Gartner, Forrester, and IDC published research.

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