Nadav Czerninski

A Captain in Israel's Cyber Units

Czerninski served as a captain in elite IDF cyber units for more than six years, as a researcher and team leader responsible for new cybersecurity operations and technologies, and he was recognized for his team leadership. He studied computational neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before co-founding Oligo, according to his ICON SV101 alumni profile.

Three Friends and an Instagram Flaw

He wrote in Oligo's launch post in February 2023: My co-founders, Gal Elbaz and Avshalom Hilu, and I have been best friends for as long as we can remember. The idea took shape after Elbaz showed that a widely used app could be compromised through a single open source library. Czerninski told Calcalist: we realized that there is a significant gap in the way the market currently addresses open source security.

Oligo came out of stealth with $28 million in seed and Series A funding. In 2024 Czerninski said the founders wanted to shift the balance in application security toward the defenders.

Runtime in the Age of AI Exploits

When Oligo raised $60 million in August 2026, Czerninski argued that AI has made runtime the last line of defense. AI has fundamentally changed the economics of exploitation, he said. When attackers can find vulnerabilities and build exploits at machine speed, runtime becomes the only place you can definitively understand true risk and stop real attacks without breaking production.