Itamar Apelblat

Ten Years in Unit 8200

Apelblat started his career in cybersecurity at 18, joining the team that secured the infrastructure and data of Unit 8200. On Techstrong TV in March 2026 he recalled how fast it grew: from a team of 20, 20 engineers, we became 200. He became an R&D group leader and said many of the hardest problems he worked on were in identity.

He met Shlomo on their first day. Shlomo told TechCrunch: Itamar and I met 16 years ago when I helped him tie his bootlaces on our first day being recruited into Unit 8200. Apelblat later founded a fintech startup before the two started Token.

A Contractor Account With Full Access

The idea for Token came from an incident at a previous job, where Apelblat found that an old service account for contractors still had full access across the entire organization. He put the problem simply to TechCrunch: Hackers don’t break in; they log in. He added that enterprises had done a good job securing human identities with tools like multi-factor authentication, but automated systems are different.

Moving to New York

With its $20 million Series A in January 2025, Token said it would move its headquarters from Israel to the United States. Apelblat moved to New York, and he told Techstrong TV that the company's engineering and product teams remain in Tel Aviv while its go-to-market teams are in the US.

Looking back on 2025, he said it was the year non-human identity risk stopped being theoretical, with AI agents, service accounts, and machine credentials outnumbering human users by orders of magnitude. On the SecureITWorld ExtraMile podcast he described AI agents as a new digital workforce whose identities need the same lifecycle, compliance, and access reviews as people's.