Orca Security raises $20M to fuel growth and help enterprises gain deeper multi-cloud visibility

Orca Security, founded last year by a group of former Check Point executives and architects, announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by GGV Capital with participation from YL Ventures and SVCI (Silicon Valley CISO Investments).

The funding will fuel additional company growth to help more worldwide customers gain deeper visibility into AWS, Azure, and GCP at a fraction of the time and operational cost of alternative solutions.

Since its inception, Orca Security has been on an explosive path to solve a fundamental challenge—to provide frictionless cloud security with the breadth and depth to quickly analyze all cloud assets for risks.

The company has created the first and only cloud security solution that can find vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, leaked and weak passwords, lateral movement risk, and high-risk data without agents or per asset integrations, literally within minutes.

This unique ability is achieved using Orca Security’s patent pending SideScanning technology, which is based on reading the workloads’ run time block storage out of band, and cross-referencing this with cloud context pulled directly from the cloud vendors’ APIs.

Furthermore, unlike point solutions that work in silos, Orca treats a customer’s cloud estate as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on environmental context. This cuts through thousands of security alerts to reveal the critical few that matter, along with their precise path to remediation.

“Organizations expect to have rapid cloud growth while maintaining security. This cannot be achieved by playing whack-a-mole with per-asset agent deployments,” said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder of Orca Security, and former Chief Technologist at Check Point Software Technologies.

“You can’t continue to iterate on tools designed for on-prem environments and expect to win the coverage game in the cloud. You lose both agility and security. Orca Security has developed an entirely new way of helping organizations identify, understand, and prioritize cloud security issues—without slowing their innovation or worrying about the thoroughness of their coverage.”

While network scanners and agent-based security tools have existed for decades, they incur huge operational costs, yet leave the organization vulnerable to breaches by only offering partial visibility. Orca Security provides a new agentless way of deeply analyzing an organization’s entire cloud infrastructure to solve these challenges.

“These days, any cloud security solution that requires agents, libraries or costly and complex integrations should be out of the question,” said Ian Amit, Chief Security Officer for Cimpress.

“In contrast, Orca Security provides a comprehensive security perspective that doesn’t require material changes to the cloud environment, but still identifies all issues across the entire stack – OS, applications, and services.”

Investing in a better way to find cloud security risks

With the latest Series A round, in addition to $6.5 million in seed funding, Orca Security is making a substantial investment in talent, go-to-market growth, and research and development. The company plans to double its team and total business by the end of 2020. New hiring will be divided between its U.S. and Israel offices.

The Series A funding round is being led by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in companies shaping digital transformations around the world. Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner, GGV Capital will also join the board of directors.

The funding also includes participating investments from YL Ventures, a global VC firm exclusively focused on seed-stage Israeli cybersecurity investments, which led the seed round, and SVCI (Silicon Valley CISO Investments), a new angel syndicate of more than 40 prominent CISOs who pool their own funds to invest in security companies with revolutionary technologies, solving the most pressing challenges in the industry.

“It’s exciting to see Orca tackle the cloud frontier with an innovative approach that dramatically improves visibility while reducing operational costs. We’ve been impressed with Avi and the team’s ability to build for modern-day security leaders, as evident in SVCI’s remarkable response to Orca.

“The excitement of the group was incredible and validates what value Orca provides to security leaders who are facing complex security issues at scale,” said Oren Yunger, investor, GGV Capital.

“Orca’s made amazing progress and such an impact on the industry in such a short period of time. In just under 14 months, this all-star team has managed to build a core disruptive product that speaks directly to security executives, gaining a massive customer base in the process and the market confidence to secure this funding round.” – Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner and seed round leader, YL Ventures

“In a software-driven world that is moving faster than ever before, it’s extremely difficult for security teams to properly discover and protect every cloud asset. Orca Security’s novel approach provides unparalleled visibility into these assets, and brings this power back to the CISO without slowing down engineering.” – Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner GGV Capital, Orca Security Board Member