Orion Hindawi – Co-Founder & CEO of Tanium

Orion Hindawi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tanium, the enterprise cybersecurity and Autonomous IT company he founded with his father, David Hindawi, in 2007.

A software engineer, inventor, and longtime cybersecurity entrepreneur, Hindawi has spent nearly two decades building technology designed to give large organizations real-time visibility and control over millions of endpoints.

In August 2026, Tanium brought Hindawi back as CEO, replacing Dan Streetman and marking a return to the company's founder-led roots. His return comes at a pivotal moment for enterprise technology, as artificial intelligence is reshaping both cybersecurity threats and the way organizations manage increasingly complex IT environments.

Tanium says its platform now manages approximately 36 million endpoints globally, while the company remains one of the largest privately held cybersecurity businesses, with a reported $9 billion valuation.

Who Is Orion Hindawi?

Orion Hindawi is an American technology entrepreneur and cybersecurity executive best known for co-founding Tanium and developing its core endpoint-management architecture.

His career has been focused on a fundamental enterprise IT problem:

How can large organizations see, understand, secure, and control every device connected to their networks in real time?

Hindawi's answer became Tanium.

Rather than building another security product focused on one narrow threat, Tanium was designed to provide organizations with a unified layer of visibility and control across their entire endpoint environment.

That approach has made the company a major provider to large enterprises, government agencies, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, and other highly regulated customers.

Early Career and BigFix

Before Tanium, Hindawi worked alongside his father at BigFix, an enterprise software company focused on systems management.

BigFix developed technology for managing and securing large numbers of computers and endpoints.

Hindawi's experience there became the technical foundation for Tanium.

BigFix was acquired by IBM in 2010, giving Hindawi firsthand experience building enterprise software that could operate at significant scale. Tanium's own biography describes Hindawi as having led the development of enterprise-scale endpoint security and management platforms across both BigFix and Tanium.

This experience also helped shape his view that enterprise security required something more fundamental than a collection of disconnected tools.

Founding Tanium

Orion and David Hindawi founded Tanium in 2007.

Their goal was ambitious: build a platform capable of providing centralized visibility and control across massive global networks.

The company's technology was designed around the endpoint—the laptops, servers, workstations, and other devices that make up an organization's computing environment.

At the time, enterprise IT teams often relied on multiple systems that collected information at different speeds and with different levels of accuracy.

Tanium attempted to change that model by creating a unified platform capable of answering questions about an organization's entire endpoint environment almost immediately.

The company describes its early mission as building a kind of "central nervous system" for enterprise security.

The Technical Philosophy Behind Tanium

Hindawi's technical philosophy has always emphasized speed, scale, and certainty.

Large enterprises can have hundreds of thousands or even millions of endpoints.

A security platform that cannot quickly determine what devices exist, what software they are running, which vulnerabilities affect them, and what actions should be taken can leave organizations exposed.

Tanium's architecture was built to provide organizations with a near-real-time understanding of their endpoint environment.

That philosophy became one of the company's biggest differentiators.

Instead of asking security teams to assemble information from multiple tools, Tanium sought to provide a single source of endpoint intelligence.

Becoming Tanium CEO

Hindawi became Tanium's CEO in 2016.

He remained in the role through 2023, overseeing the company's expansion from an innovative cybersecurity startup into a major enterprise technology provider.

During his first CEO tenure, Tanium expanded its presence among major corporations and government organizations and continued developing its endpoint management and security platform.

Tanium's customers have included major banks, retailers, healthcare organizations, and U.S. government agencies.

The company's 2025 fact sheet reported that it served 40% of the Fortune 100, seven of the ten largest U.S. commercial banks, and all six branches of the U.S. military.

Tanium's Growth and $9 Billion Valuation

Tanium became one of the most valuable private cybersecurity companies in the world.

The company raised substantial venture funding from investors including TPG, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Ventures, and other institutional investors.

Its valuation reached approximately $9 billion, a figure that has remained the company's reported private-market valuation.

In 2025, Tanium reported more than $700 million in annual recurring revenue and approximately 1,900 employees.

The company has remained private since its founding, despite years of speculation about a potential IPO.

Orion Hindawi Steps Away From the CEO Role

In 2023, Hindawi stepped away from the CEO position and became Executive Chairman.

Dan Streetman succeeded him as CEO.

The transition allowed Streetman to focus on scaling Tanium's commercial organization and enterprise go-to-market strategy while Hindawi remained involved with strategic direction, technology, customers, and the board.

Hindawi's role during this period continued to center heavily on Tanium's technology and long-term product strategy.

The 2026 Return to the CEO Role

On August 20, 2026, Tanium announced that Orion Hindawi was returning as CEO.

Dan Streetman stepped down as CEO and from the board, while David Hindawi returned to the role of Chairman.

The decision represents a major strategic shift for Tanium.

Rather than simply changing executives, the company is returning to one of its original technical founders at a time when the cybersecurity and enterprise software markets are undergoing significant disruption from AI.

Tanium said Hindawi's return will focus on:

• Deepening its Autonomous IT capabilities

• Expanding AI throughout its product portfolio

• Strengthening customer relationships

• Expanding partner relationships

• Accelerating the company's next stage of growth

Why Orion Hindawi Returned

Hindawi's return is closely connected to the rapid transformation of enterprise IT caused by artificial intelligence.

AI is changing cybersecurity in two directions simultaneously.

First, attackers can use AI to make cyberattacks faster, more sophisticated, and more scalable.

Second, organizations themselves need AI-powered systems capable of managing increasingly complex technology environments.

That creates an opportunity for platforms like Tanium.

Hindawi has argued that AI makes Tanium's mission more important rather than less important, because organizations need stronger visibility and control as their technology environments become more complicated.

Tanium and Autonomous IT

Under its current strategy, Tanium describes itself as an Autonomous IT company.

The concept goes beyond traditional endpoint management.

Traditional IT management generally requires people to identify a problem, investigate it, decide what action to take, and manually implement the fix.

Autonomous IT aims to automate more of this process.

Tanium's vision is for organizations to have systems capable of:

Detecting → Understanding → Deciding → Acting → Verifying

with increasingly less manual intervention.

The company believes this model can help enterprises respond to vulnerabilities, configuration problems, software issues, and other IT risks much faster.

Tanium Atlas and Agentic AI

Tanium has increasingly incorporated AI into its platform.

In June 2026, the company announced the general availability of Tanium Atlas, which it described as bringing agentic AI to every commercial cloud customer.

This represents a significant evolution in Tanium's technology strategy.

Rather than AI simply summarizing security information, agentic systems can potentially perform actions based on what they discover.

That aligns closely with Hindawi's broader vision of Autonomous IT.

The goal is not merely to give IT teams better information.

It is to help technology systems act on that information.

A Founder-Led Cybersecurity Company

One of the defining characteristics of Hindawi's career is his unusually long relationship with the same technology problem.

Many startup founders move from one company or industry to another.

Hindawi has spent decades working on enterprise systems management and security.

His journey can be summarized as:

BigFix → Tanium → Autonomous IT

Each stage has built upon the previous one.

His return as CEO therefore gives Tanium a leader with deep institutional knowledge of its technology, customers, architecture, and original mission.

Leadership Philosophy

Hindawi's approach to leadership is strongly product- and technology-oriented.

Customer-Driven Product Development

Tanium has historically emphasized customer feedback as one of its most important measures of product quality.

Hindawi has argued that the company's customers should be the ultimate test of whether Tanium's technology is actually solving meaningful problems.

Solve the Fundamental Problem

Rather than adding features simply because competitors have them, Hindawi has focused on solving the fundamental visibility and control problems facing enterprise IT.

Build for Extreme Scale

His experience at BigFix and Tanium has centered on environments containing enormous numbers of endpoints.

This has shaped a product philosophy in which scalability is not an afterthought but a core architectural requirement.

Technology as the Competitive Advantage

Hindawi remains deeply involved in Tanium's technology strategy.

The company describes him as a technology visionary and inventor who holds multiple software patents related to network communications and systems management.

Tanium's Enterprise Footprint

Tanium has developed a substantial enterprise customer base.

According to company data, its platform manages approximately:

• 36 million endpoints globally

• 40% of the Fortune 100

• 7 of the 10 largest U.S. commercial banks

• 7 of the 10 largest U.S. retailers

• All six branches of the U.S. military

This customer concentration illustrates why endpoint visibility and security have become increasingly important to the company's strategy.

Challenges Facing Hindawi

Hindawi's return also comes with significant challenges.

Tanium operates in an increasingly competitive enterprise cybersecurity market.

AI is creating new opportunities, but it is also disrupting established software categories.

Competitors are incorporating AI into endpoint management, security operations, vulnerability management, observability, and IT automation.

Tanium has also experienced leadership changes and organizational restructuring during 2026.

Business Insider reported that several senior executives departed during the year, while approximately 35 research-and-development employees were affected by layoffs.

Hindawi therefore returns to the CEO role at a moment when Tanium must demonstrate that its technology platform can remain strategically important in an AI-first enterprise environment.

The IPO Question

Tanium has remained private since 2007 and has periodically been viewed as a potential IPO candidate.

The company hired CFO Marc Levine in 2021 and conducted an assessment of its IPO readiness, but Tanium has not gone public.

The $9 billion private valuation has remained an important reference point for the company, although a future public offering is not guaranteed.

Hindawi's return potentially gives the company another opportunity to focus on long-term product and market strategy before making any major capital-markets decision.

Orion Hindawi's Impact on Cybersecurity

Hindawi's significance extends beyond Tanium itself.

He has been one of the entrepreneurs who helped establish endpoint management and endpoint security as strategic enterprise technology categories.

The fundamental problem he tackled at BigFix and later Tanium has become even more important as organizations accumulate increasingly large numbers of devices, applications, cloud systems, and connected technologies.

Today, cybersecurity is no longer simply about protecting a corporate network.

Organizations must understand and control an enormous and constantly changing technology environment.

That is precisely the problem Hindawi has spent his career addressing.

The Future of Tanium Under Orion Hindawi

Hindawi's second CEO chapter is likely to be defined by one question:

Can Tanium turn endpoint intelligence into an autonomous enterprise IT platform?

The company's current strategy suggests that the answer will depend on combining its existing endpoint data and control capabilities with AI and autonomous agents.

If successful, Tanium could evolve from an endpoint management and security company into a broader Autonomous IT platform.

That would allow it to compete for a larger share of enterprise technology budgets while positioning the company for the next generation of AI-powered IT operations.

Key Facts About Orion Hindawi

Category	Details
Full Name	Orion Hindawi
Current Role	Co-Founder & CEO
Company	Tanium
Industry	Cybersecurity / Enterprise IT
Founded Tanium	2007
Co-Founder	David Hindawi
Previous CEO Tenure	2016–2023
Returned as CEO	August 20, 2026
Previous Role	Executive Chairman
Previous Company	BigFix
BigFix Acquisition	IBM, 2010
Reported Tanium Valuation	$9 billion
Reported ARR	$700M+
Endpoints Managed	36M globally
Employees	1,900+ reported in 2025
Core Focus	Autonomous IT, endpoint security & management
Current AI Focus	Agentic AI and autonomous security

Company figures are based primarily on Tanium's corporate materials and recent reporting.