Cyera launches with new cloud data security platform and raises $60 million

Cyera launches from stealth today with $60 million in funding to identify, secure, and remediate cloud data security risks.

The financing, which comes just ten months after Cyera’s formation, was led by Sequoia Capital, alongside Accel, and Cyberstarts. René Bonvanie, CMO Emeritus of Palo Alto Networks, also participated in the financing and joined the board.

Organizations are moving to the cloud in record numbers, with 51 percent of IT spending expected to shift to cloud by 2025. However, at the same time, expanding data regulations and a worsening cyberthreat environment are exacerbating data risks in the cloud. Companies’ data is typically housed across multiple environments and repositories, and firms are discovering just how complicated securing their most valuable asset is. Cloud security teams today have a huge blind spot – knowing what sensitive data they are collecting, where it is stored, who is accessing it, and whether it is secure.

Current cloud security solutions are not fit-for-purpose as they only focus on infrastructure and identity layers and are data blind. New tools are needed for a new security paradigm and there is a multibillion dollar market opportunity as they are needed by every company using the cloud.

Cyera is a cloud-native data security platform which 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, empowering teams to remediate issues. Taking the guesswork out of growing and protecting organizations’ single greatest asset, Cyera provides a continuous factual and complete recall of all their data. It is enabling a new Data Reality.

Mike Towers, Chief Security Officer at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, said, “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.”

Doug Leone, global managing partner at Sequoia, said, “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.”

Cyera’s platform can be connected to a company’s cloud footprint in minutes, regardless of the underlying data technologies, and map all datastores in the cloud, shining a spotlight into places that CISOs and security teams may not have been able to see before. From there, Cyera parses and classifies this data (including PII) and then surfaces the highest priority risks for remediation with suggested courses of action. Where existing ‘cloud security’ solutions merely manage the security posture of cloud infrastructure, Cyera provides visibility, intelligence and actionable insights to remediate potential security risks.

Cyera was co-founded in 2021 by Yotam Segev, CEO, and Tamar Bar-Ilan, CTO. The two met over a decade ago in the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) elite Talpiot leadership academy and served together in the IDF’s Unit 8200 where they founded, built, and ran the cloud security division. With a best-in-class product and engineering team, Cyera has already made inroads with multiple Fortune 500 customers and has 50 employees worldwide, including Israel and the US.

The investment will be used to develop the functionality and features of the market’s leading cloud data security platform, incorporating feedback from customers over the following months.

Yotam Segev, Cyera co-founder and CEO, commented, “The hands-on experience leading Unit 8200’s cloud security initiative gave us a real sense of both the promise and the challenges in this space. We saw just how fast data moved, replicated, and multiplied in the cloud, and how traditional approaches simply couldn’t keep pace.”

“What Yotam, Tamar and the team have managed to build in under a year is incredible,” said Lior Simon, partner of Cyberstarts, which was the seed investor in the company. “Their focus on customers is admirable. Cyera is agentless as time to value is key. It supports AWS, Azure and GCP serving any type of customer including many which have become multi-cloud.”

Phillipe Botteri, partner at Accel, said, “Cloud data security requires a new approach to addressing the secular growth in data volumes, cloud migration, and risks posed by data regulation and cyber attackers. CISOs and security teams are in need of rapidly deployable, comprehensive and innovative solutions. Cyera is well-positioned to dominate this category with its best-in-class product and world-class team led by Yotam and Tamar, both veterans of the elite Talpiot academy, as they bring data reality to cloud security.”