Glilot Capital: Kobi Samboursky's Cyber-Only VC
Glilot Capital Partners is the Herzliya-headquartered cybersecurity-only Israeli venture fund co-founded 2011 by Kobi Samboursky and Arik Kleinstein. Multiple fund vintages plus Glilot+ growth vehicle. Portfolio: Claroty, Hunters, Cyberbit.
Glilot Capital Partners is the Herzliya-headquartered cybersecurity-only Israeli venture fund co-founded in 2011 by Kobi Samboursky and Arik Kleinstein. Seed through growth via Glilot+. Portfolio includes Claroty, Hunters, Cyberbit.
What Glilot does
Glilot invests only in cybersecurity and adjacent enterprise-infrastructure companies. The specialization is total: the fund does not deploy into consumer, marketplace, fintech, health, or generalist SaaS. Every check is cyber or cyber-adjacent.
The mandate is executed across two vehicle types. The early-stage funds write seed and Series A checks into Israeli cyber founders — often the first institutional check, and often before commercial traction exists. The Glilot+ growth fund deploys later-stage capital into breakout Israeli cyber companies as they scale toward category leadership. The combined structure lets Glilot hold ownership from seed through growth in a portfolio built almost entirely from a single geographic and technical origin: Israeli cybersecurity founders, most of them coming out of Unit 8200, Unit 81, and adjacent IDF technology units.
Founders
Kobi Samboursky and Arik Kleinstein co-founded Glilot in 2011. Both bring operator backgrounds in Israeli technology — Samboursky with executive and entrepreneurial history in enterprise software before Glilot, Kleinstein with a comparable operator and investor profile. The 2011 founding placed Glilot inside the earliest wave of dedicated Israeli cyber-only venture platforms, ahead of the current-generation cyber-specialist funds that formed later in the 2013–2015 window.
Portfolio
Claroty — Industrial cybersecurity for operational-technology environments. One of the highest-valued private Israeli cyber companies. Glilot early-stage investor.
Hunters — Security operations center (SOC) automation and threat detection. Glilot lead in early rounds.
Cyberbit — Cyber ranges and training simulation for enterprise SOC teams. Israeli-founder company originally spun out of Elbit Systems.
Additional portfolio spans cloud security, identity, application security, data-loss prevention, and adjacent enterprise-infrastructure categories where Israeli founder density is highest.
Position in the Israeli cyber cluster
Glilot occupies a specific role among the four dedicated cyber-anchored Israeli VC platforms:
- Cyberstarts (Gili Raanan) — Cyber-only, tightly held LP base of CISOs. Anchor investor in Wiz.
- Team8 (Nadav Zafrir, Israel Grimberg, Liran Grinberg) — Build-and-invest platform combining venture capital with company formation.
- YL Ventures (Yoav Leitersdorf) — Cyber-only, US-Israel cross-border, series-A specialist.
- Glilot Capital Partners — Cyber-only, seed-through-growth from a single house via Glilot+.
The four funds compete for a shared pool of Israeli cyber founders, but each holds a differentiated model. Glilot's differentiator is the seed-through-growth continuity — the ability to write the first check and continue writing checks into a Series C or D round from Glilot+ without founder handoff to an outside growth fund. In a market where Israeli cyber companies increasingly stay private into the $1B+ valuation range, that continuity has become a meaningful proprietary advantage.
Primary Sources
Glilot Capital Partners corporate materials (glilotcapital.com); Claroty, Hunters, Cyberbit portfolio company disclosures; Israeli cyber venture reporting from IVC Research Center and Startup Nation Central.
