Israeli cybersecurity company Orca Security announced the close of a USD 210 million Series C round on Tuesday. The investment was led by CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), the independent growth fund of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Redpoint Ventures.
The round also included participation from existing investors GGV Capital and ICONIQ Growth. And Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI), an angel syndicate of 50 prominent CISOs, invested their personal funds.
Orca Security was founded in 2019 by former Check Point Software CTO Avi Shua and former Check Point executive Gil Geron. Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning technology is the heart of the platform. The tech reads the cloud configuration and workloads’ runtime block storage out-of-band to detect vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, authentication risk, secret keys, unsecured PII (personally identifiable information), and more.
In two years, Orca has raised nearly USD 300 million in combined funds, including a December USD 55 million Series B investment, and is now valued at USD 1.2 billion, according to a company announcement.
“Orca Security represents a revolutionary step forward in optimizing cloud environments,” said Gene Frantz, general partner at CapitalG. “Their touchless SideScanning technology is best-in-class, as confirmed by our extensive interviews with their ecstatic customers and by the senior Google security leaders who we invited to evaluate it. We believe that Avi and team not only have a compelling vision but also the ability to execute it. We’re thrilled to join Orca on their journey to reinvent cloud security.”
Orca said the funding will fuel its further disruption of the cloud security industry with agentless, workload-deep, context-aware security and compliance for Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
“By creating a security solution that actually works, we are solving a fundamental problem that has been broken since the inception of cloud security,” said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder of Orca Security. “In the face of increasing threats and rapidly expanding cloud estates, organizations can’t be burdened with installing and maintaining agents and sidecars. We enable our customers to instantly protect their cloud environments, eliminate attack paths, fuel digital transformation, and meet compliance mandates.”
By the end of 2021, Orca Security said it plans to nearly triple its R&D and sales teams and expand its sales offices in Europe, having recently opened a new office in Austria. The company also plans to open an office in Australia to better serve APAC markets.
This article first appeared in NoCamels, which covers innovations from Israel for a global audience.