Back in May, during the height of COVID mania, Orca Security announced a $20 million Series A. Now, just before Christmas, the Israeli startup reports another round - this time totaling $55 million in Series B funding. The investment was led by ICONIQ Growth, with participation from existing investors: YL Ventures, GGV Capital, and Silicon Valley CISO Investment.

Revealing everything you can’t see

With more and more enterprises moving infrastructure onto different cloud platforms, the data-security tools that previously protected an organization are no longer relevant. Without the ability to provide complete cloud infrastructure visibility, enterprises stand vulnerable in the face of a bombardment of cyber threats. According to Orca, enterprises can get only 50% visibility from their servers, leaving half of the company’s infrastructure open for attack.

Orca’s platform is based on what it calls SideScanning, allowing for immediate, agentless system deployment, adjusted to fit any server. After the one-time deployment, Orca claims that an organization can achieve comprehensive and deep visibility. This way, vulnerabilities can be flagged, weak passwords flooded, malware prevented, and other vulnerabilities in the network configurations that could lead to further attacks.

The cloud-native security startup proudly noted that its product can reveal all these problems within minutes by leveraging technology that scans servers’ virtual disc via the cloud infrastructure, and crosses that data with data pulled directly from the API’s of the cloud service providers. The platform also filters and prioritizes thousands of security alerts to expose the most critical ones, and provide remediation insight.

Orca CEO: We fundraised out of opportunity

This current funding round comes in addition to the May 2020 $20.5 million Series A, and a $6.5 million Seed round from 2019 - led by YL Ventures. In a conversation with Geektime, CEO and co-founder Avi Shua explains that the company has doubled its team, while at the same time reporting a 10X increase in revenues over a short period.

“The funding round wasn’t guided out of stress, but rather the opposite - out of opportunity,” claims Shua. “The company is experiencing phenomenal growth and we decided to fundraise while carefully advising and incorporating our existing investors to the opportunity of igniting the engine of growth. We saw our previous funding rounds bare fruit, and raising the Series B allows us to expand and invest other critical fronts.” Shua explains that the round will help the company get a head start on projects that would have otherwise been pushed down the priority list.

Shua further adds that COVID crisis has acted as accelerator for the company, with most organizations transitioning to cloud technologies. However, with rapid adoption of these technologies, Orca Security has picked up on a few mistakes that organizations are making: “In more than 80% of enterprises, we found many open links to the internet that left unmaintained can lead to catastrophic data leaks. This usually happens due to more traditional agent-based solutions being poorly implemented,” claims Shua.

Following this successful round, Orca plans on tripling its R&D team, in addition to expanding the sales team, and opening new offices in Australia and England. Orca Security was founded in 2019 by 8 former Check Point executives, including CEO Avi Shua and CPO Gil Geron.