Entrée Capital's Featured Founders series profiles Darrow co-founder and CTO Gila Hayat, offering one of the more personal accounts of how the company came to be and what drives the person building its technology.
Hayat traces her path to entrepreneurship through an unlikely route. She grew up wanting to be a theater director, considered a military career, and never touched code before her IDF service. The constant thread, she says, was a desire to create something impactful that lasts. When Evya Ben Artzi presented her with the problem Darrow was built to solve — the vast number of legal violations that go unnoticed every day — she immediately recognized it as a risk management and intelligence problem, the kind technology could address at scale. She also saw the market gap: a potentially lucrative business model aligned with genuine social impact.
The most memorable detail in the piece is a cultural one. When Darrow had just ten employees, Hayat organized an improv theater session for the full team — shoes off, music playing, everyone learning the foundational improv rule of "yes, and." The idea was that building a company means building a team that plays together. Years later, with the company at over 100 people, colleagues still use "yes, and" in day-to-day conversations without knowing where it came from. It's a small moment that says something real about how Darrow's culture was shaped deliberately from the start.
