Google’s acquisition of cloud security startup Wiz became the largest cybersecurity deal in history, according to TechCrunch. Wiz’s founders came up through the same Israeli military unit that also produced Check Point Software (CHKP) and Palo Alto Networks (PANW).
That pipeline, soldier to engineer to billion dollar founder, has no real American counterpart. The White House wants to build one.
Strip away the jargon and an incubator is simple. It is a program that hands a raw idea money, mentorship, and room to grow before it has to survive on its own as a real company.
Universities run them for student startups. Hospitals run them for medical devices. Washington now wants one built specifically for cybersecurity, paid for partly by taxpayers and partly by venture capital.
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The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director is drafting an executive order to create exactly that, according to Bloomberg.
The program would fund early cyber research and spin startups out to serve federal agencies, and a companion academy would fold the government’s scattered training programs into a single pipeline. One version of the draft even labels the effort a cyber foundry, a term that hints at how much outside capital it hopes to pull in.
The timing tracks with what is happening in the threat landscape. AI systems can now speed up cyberattacks on their own, and in a handful of documented cases, models have coordinated with each other to breach external targets without a person at the keyboard.
That kind of threat is landing on a workforce that was already stretched thin before any of this started.
The plan borrows from a proven Israeli blueprint
Officials inside the administration have pointed to Israel’s Unit 8200 as the model, an intelligence corps that trains recruits as young as 19 in offensive and defensive cyber operations.
Its alumni went on to start Check Point Software Technologies, Palo Alto Networks, and eventually Wiz, and the results show up in the numbers, not just the folklore.
Nearly half of Israeli cybersecurity companies sold for more than $100 million over the past decade trace back to Unit 8200 veterans, according to an Ibex Investors analysis cited by Calcalist. The same research put Israel’s total cybersecurity exit value at more than $23 billion over the past six years, a remarkable haul for a country of fewer than ten million people.
That is the return profile the administration is chasing, and it explains why officials are borrowing a military recruitment model instead of writing another grant program.
Back home, the workforce gap is already visible. CISA lost more than a third of its staff last year to federal cuts and voluntary departures, according to Bloomberg, and private-sector jobs keep pulling talent away with better pay and none of the security clearance delays.
The new academy is meant to plug that hole before it gets any wider.
Palo Alto Networks shows what the payoff looks like
Palo Alto Networks was founded by a former Israeli signals intelligence officer, the same lineage the White House wants to replicate at home. It sells firewalls, cloud security, and AI-driven threat detection to governments and enterprises worldwide, and its shares barely moved on the news. That is not where the real story sits.
The long-term calculus cuts two ways. A taxpayer and venture-backed foundry could function as free early-stage research for established players, since Palo Alto Networks has grown for years by acquiring smaller companies rather than building everything in-house.
A government pipeline of federal-ready startups would hand it acquisition targets it never had to fund from day one.
That same pipeline cuts against it too. Government contracts are a major reason cybersecurity incumbents carry premium valuations, and a foundry built to produce agile, federal-ready startups would end up competing for those same renewals.
Wall Street tends to shrug off early policy drafts since incubators take years to produce real products, but the exposure is already strategic, not hypothetical.
Whether the incubator becomes Palo Alto Networks’ cheapest pipeline of acquisitions or its newest source of competition may not resolve for years. Either way, it is now part of the long-term bet on the stock.
A federal foundry could also breed future rivals
A government-backed incubator would not only flatter incumbents like Palo Alto Networks. It could seed a wave of startups built from day one to chase federal cyber contracts, and those startups would eventually compete against the same vendors the model is supposed to be celebrating.
The timing is still an open question. It is unclear whether President Donald Trump has signed off on the draft order, though it has already circulated among relevant agencies.
A White House spokesperson said any policy announcement would come from the president himself, according to the Bloomberg report.
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The US is joining a global race to build founders
This fits a bigger pattern than cybersecurity alone. Gulf states and South Korea have already poured sovereign money into chip fabs and AI data centers, treating industrial capacity as a matter of national security.
Washington’s cyber incubator applies that same instinct to a different resource: the people who actually build the tools instead of just buying them.
Israel proved that a small, tightly run training pipeline can produce outsized commercial value, not just military advantage.
If Washington’s version works, the next Wiz could carry a government pedigree from the start.
If it stalls, the attempt will still mark the moment cybersecurity policy began treating the founding of companies as a national security tool in its own right, and that is worth remembering long after this particular order is signed or shelved.
