Zscaler

Zscaler was founded in 2007 by Jay Chaudhry and K. Kailash. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company has been publicly traded on NASDAQ under the ticker ZS since its initial public offering in March 2018. Zscaler provides a cloud-native Zero Trust security platform designed to replace traditional VPNs and on-premise network firewalls. The most significant event affecting its local footprint in the past 12 months was the acquisition of the Israeli startup Avalor in March 2024 for approximately $310M.

Zscaler's core technology is the Zero Trust Exchange, a global cloud network that inspects corporate network traffic. It solves the problem of securing remote workers and direct-to-cloud connections without granting access to the underlying corporate network. The solution is sold primarily to large enterprise organizations making the transition from legacy hub-and-spoke architectures to direct internet access, utilizing a per-user subscription pricing model.

The company operates three main product lines: ZIA (Zscaler Internet Access), which secures traffic routed to the open internet and external SaaS applications; ZPA (Zscaler Private Access), which grants access to internal applications hosted in private data centers or public clouds without exposing the network; and ZDX (Zscaler Digital Experience), a monitoring tool to ensure network performance and end-user visibility.

Zscaler's direct competitors in the enterprise security routing space include Palo Alto Networks (specifically Prisma Access), Netskope, and Cloudflare. The company is consistently placed as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge (SSE). It targets the premium enterprise market, capturing a significant portion of the Fortune 500 customer base.

Zscaler's Israel presence is primarily an R&D hub located in the Tel Aviv area, built almost entirely through targeted acquisitions of local cybersecurity startups. The acquisition spree began with Trustdome in 2021 (CIEM), followed by ShiftRight in 2022, Canonic Security in 2023 (SSPM and SaaS supply chain security), and culminated with Avalor in March 2024 to integrate Data Fabric capabilities. The Israeli engineering teams focus on embedding these acquired technologies into the broader Zscaler platform.