Alt Security named Most Innovative Startup and Jazz Security recognized for Best Performance following a vote by Team8’s global CISO Village community
NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / June 15, 2026 / Team8 announced today the winners of its annual CISO Village Choice Awards, presented during the CISO Village Summit, Team8’s flagship cybersecurity gathering of global CISOs, security executives, intelligence leaders, investors, founders, and cybersecurity innovators.
Held this year under the theme “Humans in the Age of Machines,” the summit explored the forces reshaping cybersecurity, including AI’s impact on offensive and defensive security models, evolving cyber and intelligence threats, risk management within large global organizations, nation-state activity, crisis response, and the next generation of cybersecurity companies.
The summit featured senior leaders from Anthropic, Check Point, Google Cloud, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Walmart, and OpenAI, alongside CISOs from Fortune 500 companies and global cybersecurity experts. Speakers included Nadav Zafrir, CEO of Check Point and co-founder of Team8, Tim Brown, CISO-in-Residence at Team8 and former CISO of SolarWinds, Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne, Sandra Joyce, VP of Threat Intelligence at Google Cloud, Jerry Geisler, CISO of Walmart, Jason Clinton, CISO of Anthropic, Dan Stuckey, CISO of OpenAI, Admiral Mike Rogers, former Director of the NSA and Partner at Team8, General Paul Nakasone, former Director of the NSA, and Amir Zilberstein, Managing Partner at Team8.
As part of the summit, Team8 hosted a cybersecurity innovation competition showcasing emerging startups and connecting them with global CISOs, investors, enterprise leaders, and cybersecurity decision-makers.
Based on votes from members of Team8’s CISO Village, an international community representing leading companies and some of the world’s foremost security leaders, the following companies were selected as this year’s winners:
Most Innovative Startup: alt
Led by co-founders Noa Hen, Nahman Khayet, Efi Weiss, and Shlomi Boutnaru, Ph.D., alt was recognized for its bold approach, differentiated thinking, and potential to address meaningful cybersecurity challenges in a rapidly evolving market.
Best Performance: Jazz
Led by co-founders Ido Livneh, Noam Issachar, Yonatan Zohar, and Jake Turetsky, Jazz was recognized for its standout presentation, strong execution, and compelling market story.
“The annual gathering of the CISO Village brings together the people confronting cybersecurity’s most complex challenges every day,” said Liran Grinberg, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Team8. “At a time when artificial intelligence is changing the rules of the game and expanding the attack surface, the direct connection between market needs and technological entrepreneurship is more important than ever. The Village gives us a strategic opportunity to deeply understand the pain points facing the world’s largest organizations and use those insights to build the next generation of cybersecurity companies.”
The awards build on the success of previous CISO Village Choice Awards winners. Last year’s honorees, Fig Security and Charm Security, later became finalists in the RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox, underscoring the strength of the Village’s collective insight and the quality of the companies emerging from the Team8 ecosystem.
Team8’s CISO Village is an international community of hundreds of senior cybersecurity leaders from leading global organizations. It brings together CISOs, security executives, founders, investors, and technology leaders to exchange knowledge, validate market needs, and help shape the cybersecurity companies of the next decade.
The awards were presented in collaboration with Google Cloud, Discount Tech, and IDB, whose support helped bring together the cybersecurity ecosystem to celebrate innovation, execution, and community.
About Team8
Team8 is a venture fund that builds companies from scratch, with the conviction that capital is not the most valuable early-stage resource, context is. Team8 operates under a unique venture creation model, collaborating and investing with leading entrepreneurs to identify significant market opportunities, develop insight-driven ideas, and build groundbreaking companies in cybersecurity, data, artificial intelligence, fintech, and digital health. Team8 supports entrepreneurs throughout the entire journey, from early strategic and business planning to research, business development, marketing, talent acquisition, and HR, through a team of over 90 domain experts and a Village of international experts from Fortune 500 and global companies. Team8 manages over $1.2 billion across multiple funds and is backed by a group of leading international investors.
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SOURCE: Team8
