Merav Bahat

Origins and early life

Merav Bahat was born in Beersheba, where she grew up in a religious home, played football and basketball with the neighbourhood boys and went to a high school for girls only. Her mother, Mazal Serussi, had grown up poor in Tunis, studied at the French-language Alliance school and, arriving in Israel as a teenager, was teaching her own class at seventeen before becoming one of the first women to run a school in Israel.

Work and career

That religious home, in the Israeli sense of an observant Jewish one, is the route by which she enters this directory, and it nearly kept her out of the army, but she enlisted and served as a soldier-teacher and then in the Givati brigade. She studied engineering at the Technion, took a master's degree at Ben-Gurion University and a leadership programme at Harvard, then held senior posts at Comverse and Flash Networks.

In 2016 she joined Microsoft Israel to lead product and business strategy for cloud security, rose to head Microsoft's global cloud security business and became deputy general manager of its Israeli research and development centre. In 2021 she co-founded Dazz, an Israeli company that automates the finding and fixing of security flaws in cloud environments, with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir, and raised 110 million dollars for it.

In November 2024 Wiz, the Israeli cloud security company led by her former Microsoft colleague Assaf Rappaport, bought Dazz for an estimated 450 million dollars, making her, she said, one of the world's only women chief executives to sell a cyber company for hundreds of millions. She left Wiz in June 2026, after its merger with Google was completed, and set about raising a fund of 25 to 30 million dollars with Rappaport for early-stage investments in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. In 2023 the Jerusalem Post named her, alongside Check Point's founder Gil Shwed, among its fifty most influential Jews.