Cyera, the cloud data security company, today launches out of stealth with $60 million in funding from both seed and Series A rounds. The financing, which comes just ten months after Cyera’s inception, was led by Sequoia Capital, alongside Accel, and Cyberstarts. René Bonvanie, CMO Emeritus of Palo Alto Networks, also participated in the financing and joined Cyera’s Board of Directors.
Needed by every company using the cloud
Organizations are moving to the cloud in record numbers, with 51 percent of IT spending expected to shift to the cloud by 2025. With the acceleration of enterprise cloud adoption, digital transformation, and data centricity, security teams need data reality more than ever to discover, classify, assess, and remediate risks arising from data in the cloud; since expanding data regulations and a worsening cyberthreat environment are exacerbating data risks in the cloud, there is a dire need for security solutions. Current cloud security solutions are not fit-for-purpose as they only focus on infrastructure and identity layers and are therefore data blind; new tools are needed for a new security paradigm. Typically, companies’ data is housed across multiple environments and repositories which makes it very complicated to secure. Since standard CSPM tools look at the infrastructure level only, they do not have visibility into the data itself and therefore can’t answer where sensitive data is located, where it is moving, where it was created, who is accessing it, or whether it was kept or created securely. This poses huge vulnerabilities to companies because without understanding the data, CSPM tools can completely miss critical problems. This challenge was particularly felt by the two founders Yotam Segev (CEO) and Tamar Bar-Ilan (CTO) during their time leading the IDF’s Unit 8200 cloud security division; they realized how fast data moved, replicated, and multiplied in the cloud, and how traditional approaches simply couldn’t keep pace. And so, they decided to set off on a new journey, to create a new approach for cloud data security in a way that would address the growth in data, cloud migration, and risks seen by companies.
Multibillion-dollar market opportunity
Cyera is a cloud-native data security platform that instantly and automatically discovers all of a company’s data, across clouds and datastores, and then determines which of that data is sensitive and where it’s most at risk. In just minutes, Cyera’s platform can be connected to a company's cloud footprint, regardless of the underlying data technologies. Since CISOs and security teams require rapidly deployable, comprehensive, and innovative solutions, Cyera’s platform is just the solution. It provides a continuous factual and complete recall of all their data by displaying all datastores in the cloud. So, not only do security teams have a rounded, current, and correct picture of their data reality, they are now empowered to remediate any security, risk management, and compliance issues to ensure the entire organization operates with the same policies and guardrails. Cyera supports AWS, Azure and GCP, so it serves any type of customer including many which have become multi-cloud. As Doug Leone, Global Managing Partner at Sequoia, stated, “Cyera takes a new-age approach to solving the growing data security problem in the cloud. We believe Cyera’s comprehensive data reality platform will have an incredible impact on securing the cloud, and we look forward to partnering with this world-class team.”
“My team couldn’t believe how easy it was to get Cyera up and running. It instantly discovers the vast amounts of data we have across AWS, assesses the associated risks, and drives swift remediation. It’s become a crucial pillar of our cloud security projects.” – Mike Towers, Chief Security Officer at Takeda Pharmaceuticals
So far, Cyera has scaled its team to over 50 employees worldwide. Moreover, they are rapidly gaining traction with multiple Fortune 500 customers. The investment will be used to develop the functionality and features of their cloud data security platform which will incorporate feedback already received from current customers.
