Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk

Origins and early life

Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk built her career in the Israeli technology industry after serving in the Israeli army, which, she has said, made later business decisions easier.

Work and career

She was chief operating officer of Cyota, an Israeli cybersecurity company, and stayed on after RSA Security bought it in 2005, rising to general manager of global solutions. She joined Microsoft in 2013 and founded its Israeli cybersecurity centre, leading acquisitions that included the Israeli start-up Adallom. In February 2020 she became general manager of the Israel research and development centre, the first woman in the post, at a centre that then employed about 1,500 people in Herzliya, Haifa and Nazareth.

In May 2022 she was also named chief technology officer of Microsoft's newly merged security division, under Charlie Bell, and helped build products such as Azure Sentinel. Speaking at a Jerusalem Post conference in 2021, she urged that women, Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews all take part in Israeli high-tech. In 2023 the Jerusalem Post counted her among its fifty most influential Jews, noting a centre of about 2,700 employees working on cybersecurity, analytics and artificial intelligence.

In September 2026 she announced that she would leave Microsoft at the end of the year, after thirteen years there, six and a half of them at the head of a centre whose workforce had doubled. No source states her Jewish identity in so many words, but an Israeli executive's biography has little reason to mention it. She is here under the Israeli presumption the site adopted on 7 September 2026 and extended on 15 October 2026 to Ashkenazi surnames — a Hebrew given name, a life in Israel and a strong attested tie, here her army service and her senior role at the Israeli company Cyota — which is a presumption and not a declaration, and which any contrary source overturns.