Gal Malachi

Gal Malachi is co-founder and chief technology officer of Terra Security, which sells continuous penetration testing carried out by AI agents under human supervision. He started the company in 2024 with Shahar Peled, its chief executive, and is based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

From military intelligence to BigID

Malachi served as an intelligence officer in the Israeli military from 2009 to 2014, according to his professional profile. He then worked from 2015 to 2019 as a cloud automation engineer and software developer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and moved to BigID, a data security and privacy company, where he rose from senior developer to director of software engineering. Before Terra he was entrepreneur in residence at the venture firm FXP, now Lama Partners, which later invested in Terra.

Testing at the speed of shipping

He says he kept seeing the same gap while building and securing systems at large companies and startups. “Engineering velocity kept increasing,” he told ITTech Pulse in April 2026. “But security validation did not evolve at the same pace.” Penetration testing, in which experts attack a system to find what can be broken, stayed “mostly manual, periodic, and expensive,” he said, while AI coding tools let teams ship new features in hours.

Terra’s answer is a set of specialized agents that explore an application, chain weaknesses together, and run the attack to see whether it works. “The key shift is from finding potential issues to proving real risk,” he said. His advice to security chiefs is to test as part of normal software delivery. “The key is to close the gap between how fast you build and how fast you validate.”