In a world where startup news cycles move at breakneck speed, there’s something magnetic about the companies that don’t announce themselves. The founders who slip into stealth mode create a different kind of buzz that isn’t built on splashy launches but on whispers and reputations. Often, they are not first-time entrepreneurs but battle-tested builders who have already scaled, sold, and shaped industries.
Yossi Barishev
Barishev built his career in the trenches of cyber warfare, beginning with his service in Israel’s elite cyber units. He went on to serve as a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies and spearheaded responses to some of the world’s most high-profile cyber incidents. Most recently, he held a series of security leadership roles, culminating in leading security operations and innovation at Fireblocks.
In 2025, he stepped quietly into stealth mode as CEO of a new venture, focused on the intersection of identity security and AI, with a mission to make IAM operations and practitioners dramatically more efficient.
Noam Salinger
Noam Salinger is a seasoned product leader with a proven track record of scaling technologies and building impactful solutions. At Granulate- a company acquired by Intel in 2022—he served as VP of Product Management, spearheading the ideation, execution, and refinement of Granulate’s expanding suite of cost-optimization tools. Before that, Noam held several product and developer positions in AI Israeli startups.
Aran Komatsuzaki
AI researcher Aran Komatsuzaki is known for contributions to GPT-J and widely read writings on scaling laws and efficient training; he has been active with EleutherAI and Georgia Tech.
Kah Seng Tay
Tay has held senior engineering roles at some of Silicon Valley’s most innovative firms. He led teams at Quora, drive.ai, and Airtable, where he served as GM of engineering. Now a founder in stealth, Tay has kept quiet for more than a year, according to founder databases.
Iñaki Merino Ruiz
A founder with multiple exits under his belt, Ruiz built and sold realxdata, an analytics platform acquired by Moody’s in 2021, and earlier founded Pinkstart, another acquired venture. His recent company, Mutual, pioneered a rental-backed financing model in Spain.
Sunil James
James co-founded Scytale, which created the open-source SPIFFE and SPIRE projects and has since become an industry standard for securing workloads in zero-trust architectures. When HPE acquired Scytale in 2020, James joined as Senior Director of Product & Engineering, helping scale its cloud-native security efforts.
Boyd Christiansen
Christiansen has long been at the intersection of startups and mentorship. He co-founded Palladium, a venture-backed platform building at the intersection of AI and M&A, and previously co-founded Lovage (YC W22).
Though not officially branded as stealth, Palladium has kept a low profile, suggesting Christiansen prefers to let product momentum speak louder than marketing.
Rudmila Rahman
Rahman blends finance, partnerships, and growth. Public profiles show prior stops across Barclays, OnDeck, and AWS, and she’s currently operating in stealth.
Yusha Hu
As founder and CEO of Local Bushel, Hu has built a marketplace linking chefs with small and medium farms, modernizing local food sourcing for the restaurant industry. Today, her LinkedIn simply reads “Stealth Startup,” leaving many wondering if she’s applying the same community-driven thinking to another overlooked sector.
Murtaza Zafer
With a résumé that spans Bell Labs, Samsung, IBM, Qualcomm, and Nyansa, Zafer brings deep expertise in networking and AI. At Nyansa, he spearheaded AI/ML efforts before the company was acquired by VMware, where he went on to lead VMware Edge Intelligence.
Guy Arazi
Arazi has been a fixture in California’s cyber scene for years, with ties to the Forbes Technology Council and a career of hands-on leadership in enterprise security.
Jacob E. Hirshman
Hirshman has navigated both Wall Street and crypto’s frontier. He spent time at Sullivan & Cromwell advising on financial regulation and later at Circle, where he focused on strategy and compliance in digital assets. He has been in stealth since February 2025.
Michael Bramlage
Bramlage is best known as co-founder and CEO of Quidd, the digital collectibles startup backed by Sequoia that rode the early wave of NFT enthusiasm. Earlier he led mobile product at Nokia/Microsoft. More recently, he’s been building advanced growth channels for insurance, fintech, and subscription businesses (“Factory”).
Parmeet Chaddha
Chaddha has a history of scaling both hardware and software ventures. He served as EVP of Products and Technology at Pano Logic, an early player in desktop virtualization, and co-founded MobileVerbs, which was acquired by iLoop Mobile.
Scott Draves
A pioneer of generative art, Draves created Electric Sheep, a long-running distributed “collective intelligence” screensaver that evolves abstract animation. He later joined CTRL-labs (acquired by Meta in 2019) and most recently served as VP Engineering at Stability AI.
Conclusion
These founders reflect a shift in how ambition looks in 2025. Instead of chasing headlines, they are perfecting technology behind the curtain, waiting until timing and market alignment are just right.
Their silence is part strategy, part discipline, and it’s working. For those watching the stealth economy unfold, the only certainty is that when these founders decide to reveal what they’ve been building, the industries they touch won’t stay the same.
