Inside the $8 billion cybersecurity acquisition that rescued ServiceNow from the ‘Saaspocalypse’

In 2007, Assaf Rappaport was 24 years old and working inside Unit 81, an elite technology division of the Israeli Defense Forces that builds hardware and surveillance tools. For weeks, a friend had repeatedly badgered him about a 19-year-old soldier he was serving alongside, named Yevgeny Dibrov, insisting Rappaport needed to meet him.“He kept telling me, this guy is being wasted there, you need to talk to him,” Rappaport told Fortune.Before the two ever spoke, the friend told Rappaport that Dibrov had once won second place in a regional bout of Chidon Tanach, Israel’s national Bible trivia championship—a contest that requires memorizing scripture well enough to answer detailed trivia questions. Dibrov, who was not religious, entered purely to win. “I said, oh my God, this guy can probably do everything,” Rappaport recalled thinking.

Soon after, the two men spoke on the phone, one of them a teenager, the other already a rising figure inside Israeli military intelligence. They talked about Dibrov’s work, his dreams and aspirations, and whether he was in the right military unit. “By the end of that conversation, I knew I wanted him to be part of my unit,” Rappaport said. It wasn’t until Dibrov joined Rappaport’s command that the two men met face-to-face.

Rappaport became Dibrov’s commanding officer. “He would come in the morning with TheMarker, basically Israel’s Wall Street Journal, and we had terrific discussions and fighting about things unrelated to intelligence and computer science and cyber, but talking about business,” he said. 

In April 2026, ServiceNow paid $7.75 billion cash for Dibrov’s company, Armis, a platform that monitors every connected device on an enterprise network—medical equipment, industrial systems, or other “internet of things” devices—and then flags the ones that pose a security risk.

It was the largest acquisition in ServiceNow’s history and the second-biggest pure startup exit in Israeli tech ever. (By coincidence, Rappaport holds the top spot with Google’s $32 billion acquisition in 2025 of Wiz, a cloud cybersecurity company.)

Dibrov, 38, and his co-founder, Nadir Izrael, split roughly $930 million between them in the exit. Dibrov became general manager of the newly formed Armis business unit inside ServiceNow, with Izrael as group vice president of product and engineering. The two are running roughly the same operation they built a decade ago, just bolted onto a company with a $180 billion market cap and thousands of enterprise customers. 

When news of the Armis deal first leaked to Bloomberg in mid-December, ServiceNow’s stock opened down 9% that Monday. The market reaction mirrored a then-new fear gripping software stock investors: that AI agents would make traditional enterprise software obsolete. By spring, Wall Street had coined the term “SaaSpocalypse.” ServiceNow fell, down as much as 42% in the first four months of 2026, worse than Salesforce over the same stretch.

Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s chief product officer, doesn’t buy the SaaS doomsday premise. “We did not really believe in this SaaS apocalypse,” he told Fortune, noting that the company was hitting or beating its own financial targets every quarter through the scare.

Rather than treat the moment as a threat, Zavery said ServiceNow saw it as an opening. The acquisition of Armis allowed ServiceNow to fold cybersecurity, IT asset management, and industrial device monitoring into a single platform. “That’s where our thinking was, and that’s how we’re seeing the traction play out very well. Our thesis was accurate, as you can see,” he said.

In May, ServiceNow shares surged 41%, its best performance since going public in 2012. The stock jumped another 8% in late July after second-quarter earnings beat estimates, outrunning Salesforce and Workday in the........

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