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This AWS product leader couldn't install his own product. So he built a $42m company - #0094, Gal Ordo

His experience at AWS, followed by frustrated Fortune 100 customers asking why they couldn't prevent cloud security failures in the first place, became the founding thesis behind Native Security.

The week Gal Ordo joined Amazon Web Services as the Product Leader for AWS Security Hub, he did something his colleagues thought was unnecessary. Instead of using the internal templates that AWS provided to get the product up and running, he insisted on installing it from scratch the way a customer would - no shortcuts or help from the team that built it.

But then he said it took him four to five days.

“It was so hard for me to install,” said the co-founder and CPO of Native Security. “And I am within AWS! I’m the product leader for that. What does it mean for a customer going in the first time trying to use that? At best, they give up; at worst, they misconfigure it, and then they don’t have active security coverage.”

That initial moment planted the first seed. But the second came a month later, when Ordo attended his first Executive Briefing Center session on behalf of Amazon. There, a room of executives from Fortune 100 and Fortune 50 companies had one message for the young product leader sitting across from them: “Why are you showing us the problem after it happens? Why can’t we just prevent it?”

“I remember them telling me, ‘Why do you even allow me to get to that place? Why don’t you just give me the knob to say this can never happen in the first place?’” Ordo recalled.

It was those two experiences, operating a product too complex for its own builders to operate, and a customer too exhausted to keep reacting, that became the founding logic of Native Security. The Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup emerged from stealth in March 2026 with an official $42 million in funding (he says they have already secured more, up to $55 million), and a collection of Fortune 100 customers already running its platform in production.

According to industry research, 80% of cloud breaches stem from misconfigurations — resources left exposed, permissions set too wide, settings that drifted after an engineer’s late-night change. Among companies that use multiple cloud providers, only 33% have a unified security strategy across them. Ordo’s argument to me is that the tools to close that gap have always existed inside AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle - but enterprises cannot operationalize them at scale.

Native’s answer is what Ordo calls a control plane, a platform that lets security leaders specify an outcome in plain language, such as: “My sensitive data should never be exposed to the internet.” It then translates it into enforceable technical controls across all four major cloud providers simultaneously, using those providers’ own native capabilities rather than adding another external layer.

Before any policy goes live, the platform simulates its impact by surfacing which services might break, or which cross-cloud dependencies might be disrupted, so security teams can act without fear of taking down production.

“The building blocks are there, they’re strong, they’re powerful,” Ordo said. “But they’re hard for customers to use.”

Ordo co-founded the company with Amit Megiddo, CEO, who led Amazon GuardDuty, and Eyal Faingold, CTO, who served as VP of Cloud Security Products at Check Point. Between them, the three founders have shipped security products used by tens of thousands of enterprise customers globally.

The initial $31 million Series A was led by Ballistic Ventures, whose roster includes Phil Venables, former CISO of Google Cloud. He joined the round and, later, the board, even calling Native’s approach “the next big evolution in cloud security.” The company currently employs around 50 people across Tel Aviv and the United States, drawing talent from IDF cyber units, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, and CyberArk, with a target of 90 by the end of 2026.

The founding question was whether the knowledge they accumulated inside those organizations could be turned into something different. Notably, knowledge of where the tools broke down, where customers gave up, and where the cycle of detect-and-react became self-perpetuating.

“There is a reason this hasn’t been done before,” he concluded. “It’s incredibly difficult to achieve. The technical problems we’re solving are very hard.”

[5-MINS PREVIEW: The founding story of Native Security]

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