Around six years ago, Elhadad and Milner co-founded the cybersecurity startup Argon, which was acquired within a year by Aqua Security for $100 million. At the start of 2025, they began their second entrepreneurial journey with the founding of Echo, a company developing secure-by-design, AI-native software infrastructure.
The Mamram Awards selection was made by hundreds of Mamram alumni serving in senior management roles across Israel’s high-tech industry. The award was presented at the alumni gathering by Yossi Melamed, chairman of the Mamram Association, together with judo fighter Peter Paltchik, two-time Olympic medalist at the Paris and Tokyo Olympics.
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Eilon Elhaddad and Eylam Milner receiving the award from Yossi Melamed, CEO of the Mamram Association
(Photo: Niv Kantor)
Yossi Melamed: “Eilon and Eylam are one of our best example for Mamrams DNA — technological entrepreneurs who choose to keep trying to make the world a more secure place. We are all so proud of them.”
Echo, founded in early 2025, has reached a series of milestones in less than a year. The company has raised $50 million from investors including N47, Notable Capital, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne’s S Ventures. Its solution is already deployed and operating successfully at dozens of organizations, including Vectra AI, EDB, Port, UiPath, Varonis, and others. Among the company’s partners that have completed integrations with Echo are Wiz, Orca, Aqua, Mend, Anchoe, and many more. Echo employs 35 people across Israel and New York, and it continues to expand rapidly.
Eilon Elhadad, Co-founder and CEO of Echo, said: “I would like to thank my fellow Mamram alumni for this honor. This award, like all of our successes in recent years, begins and ends with the people who walk this long road with us. Our team consists of the strongest professionals in their fields who are committed and driven by the belief in our vision to build a large, successful company that’s redefining cybersecurity for organizations.”
Nearly all modern cloud-based applications are built on container base images: a pre-built operating system layer that defines an application’s runtimes and dependencies. While these foundational images offer numerous portability and scalability benefits to millions of developers and are used by virtually all of the world’s largest enterprises, they also expose applications to significant security risks. In fact, according to Echo's research, official Docker images, like Python, Node.js, Go, and Ruby, each contain well over 1,000 known vulnerabilities (CVEs).
Echo solves this with CVE-free container base images that are built from scratch to eliminate vulnerabilities at the source. Rather than trying to fix vulnerable open-source images, Echo reconstructs them with only essential components to reduce the attack surface, while maintaining full functionality. These hardened container images are drop-in replacements for standard Docker images. Developers simply change one line in their Dockerfile to switch from the vulnerable open-source version to Echo's clean equivalent, instantly eliminating the vast majority of their application’s vulnerabilities.
Echo uses purpose-built AI agents that work autonomously to create container images from scratch and maintain them as new vulnerabilities emerge. When a new CVE is discovered anywhere in the world, Echo's AI agents automatically research the vulnerability, identify affected images, find or develop fixes from unstructured sources (like GitHub comments, forums, and blogs), apply patches, run comprehensive compatibility testing, and create a pull request for human review. This AI-driven approach enables Echo’s team of 35 to maintain 600+ secure images. Using traditional methods, this would require hundreds of security researchers.
Mamram is the first technological unit of the IDF established 66 years ago after the army decided to buy its first computer. Mamram alumni are all over the tech industry in big companies, 25% of the Israeli unicorns, and more than new 120 startups each year.