Artificial intelligence continues to be both the biggest threat and the biggest promise in the world of cybersecurity. Today, one of his startups addressing both opportunities and challenges announced a major funding round. Cyera has built an AI-based platform that helps organizations understand the location and movement of all their data within their networks. This is essential to protect against cyber-attacks or to take appropriate steps to protect data to prevent inadvertent leakage. Convert to large language model. The company has now raised a $300 million Series C round, valuing it at $1.4 billion, according to TechCrunch.
As growth rounds continue to be a big challenge for technology companies, Cyera's latest funding is notable not only for its size, but also because it almost triples the company's valuation in less than a year. (The company last raised $100 million in Series B in June 2023.) This speaks to the company's traction with users — although it didn't disclose numbers, It includes a large number of large multinational companies — but also speaks to the company's particular outlook on the market and how it works. It's dealing with it.
We and others reported on this fundraiser while it was still in progress. Today's news confirms several details we revealed, including the size of the round and the startup's new backer, lead investor Coatue. Other new investors include Spark Capital, Georgian and strategic backer AT&T Ventures.
AT&T is a notable name here. In March, we revealed that the multinational airline had lost the details of 7.6 million current account holders and more than 65 million former account holders online as a result of a data breach that occurred in 2019. It was revealed that the company had to initiate a large-scale reset of accounts. Incidents like this are typical of what prompts companies to sign up for his Cyera in advance of a crisis or to prevent a new one.
CEO Yotam Segev said in an interview, “How many times a month do you get a subtle call from a CISO asking if you have time?” “'Something's going on,' they say. 'I need how quickly I can scan my environment.' It happens every time. And what we do is we jump on it. We send a squad to investigate what data is in range. You may not even know what data has been compromised. (It should be noted that AT&T's breach occurred before Cyera was founded.)
In short, Cyera has built a platform to fully assess an organization's data, where it's created, where it's stored, and where it's used.
This in itself is not an easy task. Today, most organizations work in a hybrid environment with a variety of apps and devices, cloud and on-premises servers, and the amount of data measured in the tens of zettabytes grows exponentially to the hundreds of zettabytes. Because it is. Analysts predict that for the next few years. The spaghetti of connections and activities has turned into a nightmare when it comes to data auditing.
Cyera is part of the general category of “posture management,” and there are many other companies in this space, including big names like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and Fortinet. Almost everyone can agree on why proper posture management is necessary. That said, to manage your posture, it's important to know what you have and where it is. Cyera's additional steps include not only using AI to handle that process, but also looking at the next generation of enterprise applications and use cases and the challenges they will bring to data state management. is. In today's world, the next generation is all about one thing: artificial intelligence.
“If you think about it, the biggest gap for enterprises today is AI security,” Segev said. “They have no control over the data, and the AI runs on the data,” he said of how large-scale language models are built and then function. “But when you don't know what data you have, where it exists, how many duplicates of it there are, and even what the source of truth is and the five-year-old copy, you can't actually How do we leverage this? How do we get the most out of this technology? When you think about the risks that AI poses to these companies, it comes down to losing proprietary data.”
Both Segev and his co-founder Tamar Bar-Ilan (CTO) trained in the Israeli military, a training ground that puts engineers into real-world scenarios to test cutting-edge technology. Ta. What's catching investors' attention is adding a strong layer of entrepreneurial spirit (and a degree of glamor and salesmanship) to these learnings.
“We will use this investment to continue growing our customer-facing offering into the data security platform that our customers want,” Segev said. “And they don't want to piece together 20 products to make this program happen. They want to buy from one vendor.”
Previous backers Sequoia, Accel, Redpoint and Cyberstarts all also participated, bringing the total amount raised by New York-based Cyera, which has Israeli roots, to $460 million in just three years. reached the dollar.
Although Doug Leone is no longer an active partner at Sequoia, he continues to serve on the boards of several companies, one of which is Cyera.
“The co-founders here are as good as any co-founder I've ever done business with. They're clearly outliers,” he said in an interview. “They had a vision of the growing need and awareness that was going to hit us like an avalanche. Data is the goldmine for every company.”
“Customer response to Cyera as a platform is reminiscent of the early days of ServiceNow,” David Schneider, general partner at Coatue Management, said in a statement. “We are confident that Cyera will grow to become an important part of enterprise data security, which is critical with the advent of AI.”