Modern enterprises generate vast amounts of security data, but traditional tools like Splunk require businesses to store all the data in one place before they can detect threats. This process is time-consuming, costly, and increasingly dysfunctional in cloud environments where volumes are exploding and data is everywhere.
AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security wants to flip this approach by running security where the data already exists, implementing it in cloud services, data lakes, and existing storage systems. And the two-year-old company just raised $120 million in a Series B round to expand its vision, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
The new round, led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV, nearly doubles Vega's valuation to $700 million, bringing total funding to $185 million, which the startup will use to further develop its AI-native security operations suite, strengthen its go-to-market team, and expand globally.
Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch that the current operating model for SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), which has been the dominant technology in the space for the past 20 years, is not only “extremely expensive,” but is increasingly causing AI-native security operations to fail. He said that in complex cloud environments, current models often increase exposure to threat actors.
“Vega has defined a new operating model that enables organizations to leverage the full potential of enterprise data to achieve incident response readiness without complexity, cost, or effort,” Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch. “We want to enable AI-native detection and response capabilities at scale no matter where the data resides.”
Like many cybersecurity founders, Sandler served in the Israeli military's cybersecurity division before becoming one of the founding employees of Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million in 2022. After a year at Intel, Sandler decided to “make it big in the world of cybersecurity.”
That pedigree, in part, caught the attention of Axel's partner Andrei Vlasovianu. But it was also Vega's ambitious approach to security management in a market already dominated by one player: Splunk.
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Brasoveanu told TechCrunch that legacy SIEM companies like Splunk, which Cisco acquired for $28 billion in 2024, have been criticized in recent years because their solutions are difficult to scale. Unable to handle the insane amount of data generated by AI.
“Splunk and subsequent competitors have always centralized their data, but when they do that, they essentially hold their customers hostage,” Brasoveanu says.
But sometimes it's easier to hate the status quo than to work on switching to a better alternative, a difficulty any startup looking to infringe on a company's budget understands. That's why Sandler said Vega's “north star” was to not only build a solution that was cost-effective and superior in threat detection, but to “make it as easy as possible, without drama, so that the world's largest, most complex enterprises could deploy it within minutes.”
Vega's approach seems to be working well. The 100-employee startup already has multimillion-dollar deals with Fortune 500 companies, including banks, health care companies, and cloud-heavy companies like Instacart.
“The only reason you would do that for a two-year-old startup is because the problem is so painful that other solutions on the market require companies to either change the way they operate or have unrealistic expectations for two years of data migration,” Sandler said. “With Vega, you can simply plug and play and quickly achieve detection response values.”