Home / Founders / Moti Rafalin
Rafalin is betting that AI coding tools will only modernize large enterprise applications once they can see how those applications behave at runtime, and vFunction sells that view.
Moti Rafalin is co-founder and chief executive of vFunction, an application modernization company in Menlo Park, California, that helps enterprises break large Java and .NET applications into modern services. He has spent more than 20 years in enterprise infrastructure, application, and security software.
Leading Engineering Teams in the Israeli Air Force
Rafalin served in the Israeli Air Force, where he led teams of engineers, technicians, and operational officers on technology projects, according to Enterprise Networking Planet. He graduated from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Running Application Management at EMC
He was general manager of the application management business at EMC, the storage and infrastructure company. That job put him close to the large business applications that enterprises depend on and find hard to change.
Building WatchDox Until Its Sale to BlackBerry
Rafalin then co-founded WatchDox, a secure enterprise mobility and file collaboration company, and led it from inception until BlackBerry acquired it. He grew the company for more than 20 consecutive quarters and afterward served as a senior vice president at BlackBerry.
Founding vFunction After a Monolith Fight
vFunction says its founders started the company because of the pain of modernizing a massive Java monolith at their previous company, which led them to spend years researching large applications before launching, according to its About page. Rafalin co-founded it with Amir Rapson and Ori Saporta. In interviews he has argued that moving old applications to the cloud unchanged misses most of the benefit, and vFunction now pairs its runtime analysis with AI coding tools and its own engineers.
